Dr. Nils Gilman

Nils Gilman is Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, Research Director of the Futurific Institute in Basel, and cofounder of the Impact Council at the Berlin-Charité Competence Center for Traditional & Integrative Medicine. His scholarship spans intellectual history, political economy, and planetary governance. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, co-author with Jonathan Blake of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises. His next book, Three Visions, One Planet, is forthcoming from Tre Oci Press. He writes the Substack Small Precautions and hosts the Futurology podcast. In collaboration with Georg Seifert of Charité Berlin, Gilman is developing the concept of Planetary Salutogenesis that reframes health creation at a planetary scale. Drawing on the Dutch Positive Health model and Nordic salutogenesis traditions, the project asks what it would mean to design governance and institutions around the conditions that generate health and resilience, for humans and the wider biosphere, rather than only treating disease and crisis after the fact. In previous roles, Gilman has served as Associate Chancellor at UC Berkeley, a research director of foresight at the Global Business Network and the Monitor Group, and at various Silicon Valley tech firms. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in history from UC Berkeley.