About the Author

JEFF NESBIT has held four highly significant public affairs jobs with four different U.S. presidents. He is currently the Deputy Commissioner for Communications at the Social Security Administration in the Biden-Harris administration. He was the National Science Foundation’s director of legislative and public affairs in the Bush and Obama administrations; former Vice President Dan Quayle’s communications director at the White House; and the public affairs chief for FDA commissioner David Kessler, where he was instrumental in the agency’s efforts to ban cigarette marketing to children and require fact-based information on nutrition labels.

Once profiled in The Wall Street Journal as one of the seven people who ended the Tobacco Wars, Nesbit—a former national journalist with Knight Ridder and others—was also the founder and Executive Director (2011-2022) of Climate Nexus, the non-profit environmental media organization he launched after leaving the NSF in 2011. Climate Nexus (https://climatenexus.org) is funded entirely by foundations, with a staff that includes former national journalists from the Associated Press, CBS News, and other national media organizations and senior communications professionals from leading environmental groups.

Nesbit also managed a successful strategic communications company for nearly 15 years with national clients and projects that included the Discovery Channel networks, Yale University, the American Heart Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Red Cross. This company helped create and launch three unique television networks for Discovery Communications, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Lockheed Martin; developed programming and a new cable TV network concept for The Britannica Channel; global programming partnerships for the successful launch of the Discovery Health Channel, including a novel CME programming initiative and the Medical Honors live broadcast from Constitution Hall; and programming strategies for the creation of the first-ever IPTV network developed by Lockheed Martin.

While at the NSF, Nesbit was the co-creator of the Science of the Olympic Winter Games and the Science of NFL Football video series with NBC Learn and NBC Sports, which won the 2010 Sports Emmy for best original sports programming, as well as The Science of Speed, a novel video series partnership with the NASCAR Media Group.

Nesbit wrote a popular weekly science column, “At the Edge” for U.S News & World Report from 2012-2018. He contributed regularly to The New York Times, Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and Axios. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Poison Tea (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, 2016) and This Is The Way the World Ends (St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, 2018). Nesbit has also written over 30 commercially successful novels for a wide range of publishing houses, including the blockbusters Peace, Oil, and Jude. His latest novel, The Billionaires’ Club, was released in June 2023. Kirkus Reviews called it an “an engrossing tale—thoughtful, worldly, and deeply entertaining. A gripping novel that vividly captures the dark cosmos of financial malfeasance.”