John L. Hennessey

John L. Hennessey

Chairman at Alphabet
Company Tenure: 19 years
Education:
Villanova University (B.Sc.)
Biography:

John L. Hennessy has served as Chair of Alphabet’s Board since January 2018. John previously served as our Lead Independent Director from April 2007 to January 2018. John is the James F. and Mary Lynn Gibbons Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering, and the Shriram Family Director of Stanford’s Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a graduate-level scholarship program. John served as the President of Stanford University from September 2000 to August 2016. From 1994 to August 2000, John held various positions at Stanford, including Dean of the Stanford University School of Engineering and Chair of the Stanford University Department of Computer Science. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University and a Master of Science degree and a Doctoral degree in computer science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Profile Details

Affiliated Companies

Alphabet

Alphabet

Key Statements

"In fact, I was talking to Bill Gates and he had a really great insight about this. He says there are two groups of people that get the climate change challenge wrong, those that think it isn't going to happen, that climate change is false, and those that think it's going to be easy to solve. And I think that second insight is the one that's really this is going to be a really hard, possibly the hardest problem we faced after perhaps dealing with the threat of nuclear weapons."

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"And my silver wand over policy change is carbon tax. Carbon tax. And it's not such a horrible thing. If you look at I think within five years, we can get CO2 sequestration down to a cost where the added cost of a gallon of gas might be $1 to be carbon neutral. "

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"So we have a brand new school of sustainability, for example, that is highly interdisciplinary and includes people who are working on environmental law and environmental ethics, as well as people working on science and technology to halt the danger of climate change."

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"And I think sustainability is the number one global problem, although there are a few others pandemics quality of life that are not that much further on the list. But climate change is a crisis coming to us and we are going to have to solve it globally. It can't be solved by any one country alone and I think that an appreciation of diversity and inclusion is critical to doing that because I need to think not just about my local community."

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