Elke Weber has made it her life’s work to understand why and how people make the decisions they make. Not a simple task. Take, for example, smoking cigarettes. Doctors’ warnings of the deadly ...

The Earth Institute was established in 1995 to advance our understanding of Earth science and apply that knowledge to decisions made by governments and businesses around the world. A world leader in ...

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages themselves are proving that by ...

Mark Cane has never been one to follow the status quo. After studying pure mathematics and what is now known as computer science at Harvard in the 60s, he took a hiatus from academia to work in New ...

The following is a list of members of the standing committees of the Earth Institute faculty, all of whom are from the Columbia University community. Clicking on a member's name takes you to a short ...

Pedro Sanchez attributes the roots of his life’s work in soil sciences to the fact that he always liked to “play with dirt.” That boyhood pastime was nurtured by the fact that his family owned a ...

Global field experience is a key element of Columbia University’s Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development. The newly-created Global Fellows in Sustainable Development Program was established ...

Vijay Modi is a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and an Earth Institute faculty member. He also lead the UN Millennium Project effort on the role of energy and energy ...

Scott Barrett, the first Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics, remembers the exact day when he became interested in researching and creating theoretical models about major ...

As a young undergraduate, Peter deMenocal once wandered the halls of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he met Charlie Hollister, a well-known and charismatic marine geologist. Charlie ...

Under the stewardship of the Earth Institute faculty, the Earth Institute moves beyond the usual academic boundaries to create a multidisciplinary approach to questions of Earth's sustainability.

Ruth DeFries examines human transformation of the landscape and its consequences for climate, biogeochemical cycling, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services that make our planet habitable. The ...