David M. Hart is a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

Hart’s research focuses on policies that will accelerate clean energy and climate-tech innovation and diffusion worldwide. He co-authored Energizing America (Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy, 2020) and Unlocking Energy Innovation (MIT Press, 2012). He has written articles and reports on a broad array of topics, including management of large-scale demonstration projects, industrial decarbonization, electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics, carbon border adjustments, and international R&D cooperation. Hart’s work contributed to the expansion of the federal energy R&D budget, the establishment of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the creation of the Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation.

Hart served as assistant director for innovation policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, focusing on advanced manufacturing issues, in 2011-2012, and as senior associate dean of the Schar School in 2013-2015. He has collaborated with many non-partisan and bipartisan organizations to develop and advance policies, including as director of the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation from 2016 to 2022. Hart was named a lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society, in 2023.

In addition to energy and climate innovation, Hart has written on high-skill migration, business-government relations, interest groups, entrepreneurship, and economic competitiveness. His other books include The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Policy (Cambridge University Press), and Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the U.S., 1929-1953 (Princeton University Press).  He earned a BA in the science in society program from Wesleyan University and a PhD in political science from MIT .