Professor Lave's work is focused on environmental quality and risk management. An early paper estimated the value of better weather information; recent work derives the optimal protocol to determine if a pregnant woman's fetus has a neural tube defect. Research on the information content of the National Cancer Institute lifetime rodent bioassay demonstrated that the test has less information than had been assumed.
Professor Lave's papers on managing the risks of catastrophic dam failure due to overtopping demonstrated how to quantify the risks. The work concluded that current safety goals are much higher for dams than for bridges and buildings.
Other recent work deals with developing public policy concerning greenhouse effects, in view of large uncertainties about the magnitude and timing of these effects.
In collaboration with Baruch Fischhoff and Granger Morgan, Professor Lave is engaged in research on risk perception and communication.
Professor Lave is the head of the university-wide Green Design Initiative which is working with businesses, such as IBM; and with government agencies such as the Department of Energy to address the fundamental problems in pollution prevention.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science and a recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Society for Risk Analysis.
