John Curtin Distinguished Professor
Sustainability Policy Institute and Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University, Australia
Peter Newman has been a tenured academic since 1974. He has been Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University since 2008 where he directed the establishment of Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (CUSP); before that he was in various positions at Murdoch University for 33 years, including establishing the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy in 1992 and a Lecturer to Associate Professor in Environmental Science before that when the profession was being established.
He has over 400 publications including 24 books. Peter’s book with Jeff Kenworthy ‘Cities and Automobile Dependence (1989) has been described as ‘one of the most influential planning books of all time’ by Reid Ewing Professor of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. The follow up book 'Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence' was launched in the White House in 1999. Since then he has written seven American books that are used as texts. In 2006/7 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Virginia Charlottesville. He was the first Australian author invited to contribute a chapter in the Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World publication – the 2007 edition being on cities and is the author of a chapter on Urban Sustainable Development in the 2009 UN Global Review of Human Settlements. Peter has supervised to completion 54 PhDs in urban sustainability policy.