Institution: Columbia University

Co-Director, Care and Protection of Children (CPC) Learning Network and Associate of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University

Assistant Professor, Population and Family Health at Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health

INSPIRE MOOC Content Lead and Learning Facilitator; Senior Program Officer, Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health onm2003@columbia.edu

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 100 countries. He is the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership. He has twice been named among Time Magazines 100 most influential world leaders. He was called by the New York Times, probably the most important economist in the world,  and by Time Magazine the worlds best known economist. A recent survey by The Economist Magazine ranked Professor Sachs as among the worlds three most influential living economists of the past decade.

Vijay Modi is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. Read more about this work here: http://me.columbia.edu/vijay-modi-0.

Marc Levy is deputy director of CIESIN. He is a political scientist specializing in the human dimension of global environmental change. He is a political scientist utilizing interdisciplinary research to understand how humans can better manage complex, interlinked systemic risk. He is well known for his work on environmental security, on global environmental governance, and on sustainability indicators. His research has been supported by a number of agencies, including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Agency for International Development, National Intelligence Council, National Aeronautic and Space Administration, UN Environment Programme, UN Development Programme, and Skoll Global Threats Foundation. He has served as lead project scientist of the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center since 1998. Levy is an adjunct professor in the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, where he teaches graduate courses on environmental security leakages. He also co-directs Columbia’s Certificate Program in Environment, Peace and Security.

Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He has broad interests in hydrology, climate dynamics, water resource systems analysis, risk management and sustainability. He is motivated by challenging questions at the intersection of these fields, especially where they have relevance to societal outcomes or to the advancement of science towards innovative application. His current research covers 3 major initiatives that are developed through the Columbia Water Center. The Global Water Sustainability Initiative is focused on an assessment of global water scarcity and risk. The Global Flood Initiative is motivated by the desire to predict and manage floods at a global scale recognizing their climate drivers, and supply chain impacts. America.s Water is driven by the goal of developing sustainable water management and infrastructure design paradigms for the 21st century recognizing the linkages between urban functioning, food, water, energy and climate. These programmatic initiatives are backed by research on systems level modeling of hydrology, climate, agronomy and economics. Manu has pioneered the application of techniques from (a) nonlinear dynamical systems, (b) nonparametric methods of function estimation and their application to spatio-temporal dynamical systems, (c) Hierarchical Bayesian models, (d) systems optimization and simulation and (e) the study of multi-scale climate variability and change as an integral component of hydrologic systems. He has published in journals that focus on hydrology, water resources, climate, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, development, policy and management science. He has been engaged in high level public and scientific discussion through the media, the World Economic Forum, and with governments, foundations, development banks, and corporations interested in sustainability. He has served on several national and international panels. He was one of the originators of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is currently the President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union.

Vasilis M. Fthenakis is the Founder and Director of the Center for Life Cycle Analysis (CLCA), Department of Earth & Environmental Engineering, Columbia University. Read more about his work here: http://eee.columbia.edu/vasilis-fthenakis.