Alex De Sherbinin

Alex de Sherbinin is the deputy director and a senior research scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), an environmental data and analysis center at the Climate School of Columbia University. Dr. de Sherbinin is a geographer whose research interests focus on the human aspects of global environmental change and geospatial data applications, integration, and dissemination. He serves as deputy manager of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), coordinator of the Population-Environment Research Network (PERN), lecturer in the Sustainability Science and Climate & Society master’s degree programs, and an author of the biennial Yale/Columbia Environmental Performance Index. From 2015-2021 he was on the World Data System (WDS) scientific committee, and he served as chair from 2020-2021.

He has published more than 65 peer reviewed articles, and he has managed projects under contract with NASA, USAID, The World Bank, UN Environment, and UNDP’s Global Environmental facility. Prior to CIESIN he served as a program officer at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and a population geographer at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). He received his PhD from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente (Netherlands), his MA in geography from Syracuse University, and his BA in geography from Dartmouth College.