Graciela Chichilnisky, Director

Graciela Chichilnisky has worked extensively in the Kyoto Protocol process, creating and designing the carbon market that has become international law in 2005. Working closely for several years with negotiators of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization in charge of deciding world policy with respect to global warming, Professor Chichilnisky acted as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC received the 2007 Nobel Prize for their work in this area. In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed by 163 nations, Dr. Chichilnisky authored the Protocol language that led to the creation of the carbon market.

Chichilnisky is the creator of the formal theory of sustainable development, providing axioms and developing the notion of sustainable development in economics in 1992. A special adviser to several UN organizations and heads of state, her pioneering work uses innovative market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions, conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services and improve the lot of the poor. The author of fourteen books and 222 scientific articles published in the preeminent academic journals covering economics, finance and mathematics, Professor Chichilnisky is an active researcher and writes and speaks extensively on globalization and the global environment, is professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics and a University Senator at Columbia University in New York, and the Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University in Australia. Dr. Chichilnisky studied at MIT and UC Berkeley, holds two Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics and in Economics respectively, and taught at Harvard, Essex and Stanford Universities.

Telephone: 212-678-1148 Email: gc9@columbia.edu

Christopher C. Barton, Associate Director

Christopher C. Barton is Associate Director of the Columbia University Consortium for Risk Management and Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Wright State University. He is a pioneer in analyzing, modeling, and forecast forecasting the behavior of complex nonlinear processes in coupled earth, environmental, human, and economic systems. Current research includes temporal dynamics of stream and river discharge, travel time distribution for precipitation moving through watersheds, spatial/temporal patterns of hurricane landfall, and shoreline change dynamics. Dr. Barton received two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Yale University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley. He was a senior research scientist and project chief the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 1984-2004. He has twice been a USGS G.K. Gilbert Fellow at IBM with Benoit Mandelbrot, the “father of Fractals.” He is the author of more than 65 published research papers and is the senior editor of two books. He has been an editor to the international journal, Fractals since 1994. He is a founder and past chair of the Nonlinear Geophysics Focus Group at the American Geophysical Union.
Telephone: 727-215-5538 Email: chris.barton@wright.edu