Robert K Musil

Robert K. Musil, PhD, MPH, is the President and CEO of the Rachel Carson Council (RCC), the legacy organization envisioned by Rachel Carson and founded in 1965 after her death by her closest friends and colleagues. The RCC promotes the environmental health issues and ethics espoused by Carson including the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, power, and wastes. Musil is also a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor with the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University where he teaches environmental and national security politics. Dr. Musil was Executive Director and CEO of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and its Director of Policy and Programs from 1992-2006. He is a graduate of Yale and Northwestern Universities and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and has been a Visiting Honorary Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and of Pembroke College, Cambridge University. He is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and frequent lecturer on college campuses. Dr. Musil specializes in contemporary global security, sustainability, and health issues, as well as Cold War history, culture, and policy. He is the author of Hope for a Heated Planet: How Americans Are Fighting Global Climate Change and Building a Better Future (Rutgers University Press, 2009) and Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment (Rutgers, 2014). A long-time leader of the peace, nuclear disarmament, and environmental movements, Dr. Musil has also been Executive Director of the Professionals’ Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control, the SANE Education Fund, the Center for National Security Studies Military Affairs Project, and CCCO: An Agency for Military and Draft Counseling. He is a former Army Captain who taught communications and policy at the Defense Information School, Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. Dr. Musil initiated PSR’s opposition to the war in Iraq in 2003 and has been central to campaigns for the CTBT, NPT, and other arms control measures. From 1978-1992, Dr. Musil was the Executive Producer and host of “Consider the Alternatives” a half-hour weekly radio program syndicated to over 150 stations with 2-3,000,000 listeners. He has been the producer of numerous ground-breaking independent video documentaries and public radio documentary series including “Shadows of the Nuclear Age: American Culture and the Bomb”; “Mushrooms: Nuclear War and the Imagination” hosted by Colleen Dewhurst; and “War in Space: The Debate over Star Wars” hosted by Ed Asner. Dr. Musil is two-time winner of the Armstrong Award for Excellence in Radio Broadcasting.