Robert Chen
Robert Chen is director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a research unit of the Earth Institute at Columbia. He has managed the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) for more than two decades and co-leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Data Distribution Center. He is a co-chair of the Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics (TReNDS) of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a Councilor of the American Geographical Society, and co-leader of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Data Sharing Working Group and Human Planet Initiative. Chen currently manages multiple sponsored projects, including support from NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Facebook. He is a member of the Earth Institute's Practice Committee and affiliated with Columbia's Data Science Institute. He received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Biography current as of June 10, 2019