Dr. Robert S. Chen

Biography

Robert S. Chen is the director of CIESIN and a senior research scientist. He served as CIESIN’s deputy director from July 1998 to April 2006 and as CIESIN’s interim director from May 2006 to January 2007. Dr. Chen is also the manager and co-principal investigator of the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), a data center in the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System. He is currently secretary-general of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and an ex officio member of the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) of the U.S. National Research Council. He has contributed to activities of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for more than a decade and currently serves as an ex officio member of the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Analysis (TGICA) and co-manager of the IPCC Data Distribution Center (DDC).

At Columbia University, Dr. Chen is an ex-officio member of the Earth Institute (EI) Academic Committee and a member of the Practice Subcommittee. He has helped to lead several EI cross-cutting initiatives such as the Center for Hazards and Risk Research (CHRR) and the CyberInfrastructure for the Earth Institute (CI4EI) project. He is currently a member of the University's Task Force on E-Science, which is developing a plan of action for Columbia to develop its cyberinfrastructure and achieve a leadership role in E-Science. Dr. Chen is also a member of the Executive Board for the Cooperative Institute for Climate Applications and Research (CICAR) and served as a member of the Working Group on Science & Technology Recruiting to Increase Diversity (STRIDE) of the EI's ADVANCE Program.

In addition to his role as SEDAC Manager, Dr. Chen has coordinated the CHRR contribution to a project on Risk Assessment and Mitigation Measures for Natural and Conflict-Related Hazards in the Asian Region, initiated by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in support of the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He is co-leading a new trans-Atlantic seminar series on risk and sustainable development with faculty from three universities in Paris, France, with support from a Columbia-Paris Alliance Joint Projects Grant.

While at CIESIN, Dr. Chen has served as co-PI of a project on Discovery, Access, and Delivery of Data for the International Polar Year (DADDI), led by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. He has managed several cooperative agreements with the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) on spatial data management and a project on managing geospatial electronic records with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). He co-led a major collaborative project on the assessment of global natural disaster risks with the CHRR, the World Bank, and other partners, which received a “Good Practice Award” in 2006 from the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. Dr. Chen also coordinated CIESIN’s spatial analysis and mapping support to the Millennium Development Project led by EI Director Jeffrey Sachs, and he has overseen other projects on poverty mapping, sustainability indicators, and public health applications of earth science data.

As secretary-general of CODATA, Dr. Chen has co-led efforts to develop implementation guidelines for the data sharing principles for the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS), under development by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). He contributed to CODATA's activities at the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), including co-authoring of an editorial in Science with former CODATA president Shuichi Iwata of the University of Tokyo. Dr. Chen led development of CODATA's Strategic Plan for 2006-2011 and is contributing to a joint project on citation of numeric data organized by the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) and CODATA. He has also helped to initiate new CODATA activities in such areas as global roads data, disaster data and information, the International Polar Year, and the electronic Geophysical Year, working with other ICSU bodies and public and private sector organizations.

Prior to joining CIESIN, Dr. Chen served on the faculty of the World Hunger Program at Brown University. He has held research fellowships at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and the National Research Council in Washington DC. He served on the Steering Committee of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change and on the Committee on Standards for Geographic Data of the Association of American Geographers. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds Masters degrees in Technology and Policy and in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His undergraduate degree was in Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT.

Selected Publications and Presentations

Uhlir, P.F., R.S. Chen, J.I. Gabrynowicz, K. Janssen, C. Barton, and J. Hill. 2008. White Paper on the GEOSS Data Sharing Principles (Review Draft). Paris: CODATA.

Downs, R.R., R.S. Chen, R.T. Cartolano, and R. Bose. 2008. Collaborative Establishment of a Long-Term Archive for Stewardship of Interdisciplinary Scientific Data. Poster Paper, Fall meeting, American Geophysical Union, San Francisco CA, 16 December.

Chen, R.S and Uhlir, P. 2008. Proposed Implementation Guidelines for the Data Sharing Principles of GEOSS: Report of GEOSS Task DA-06-01. 21st CODATA Conference, Kyiv, Ukraine, 9–10 October.

Chen, R.S., R.R. Downs, G. Yetman, S. Adamo. 2008. The Potential Role of the World Data Centers in the Global Earth Observing System of Systems and the International Polar Year: CIESIN Experience to Date. 21st CODATA Conference, Kyiv, Ukraine, 9-10 October.

Downs, R.R. and R.S. Chen. Creating a Trustworthy Digital Repository for a Long-Term Archive of Interdisciplinary Data: A Case Study. 21st CODATA Conference, Kyiv, Ukraine, 9-10 October.

Downs, R. R., J. Schumacher, R.S. Chen, and W.C. Lenhardt. 2008. Assessing the Scientific Benefits of Interdisciplinary Use of Social Science Data through Citation Analysis. International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 2008 Conference. Palo Alto CA, 28 May.

Downs, R. R. and R.S. Chen. 2008. Implementing a Digital Repository for the Preservation of Interdisciplinary Data. International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 2008 Conference, Palo Alto CA, 30 May.

Chen, R.S. 2008. Developing GIScience and Geographic Analysis Programs at Universities Which Do Not Have Geography Departments. 2008 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston MA, 15-19 April.

Ahamed, S., S.B. Adamo, M. Levy, and R.S. Chen. 2008. The Role of Spatial Data Infrastructure in Integrating Climate Change Information with a Focus on Monitoring Observed Climate Impacts. UN Conference on Climate Change and Official Statistics, Oslo, Norway, 14-16 April.

Ahamed, S., S.B. Adamo, M. Levy, and R.S. Chen. 2008. Why Demographic Data Are Not Up to the Challenge of Measuring Climate Risks and What to Do about It. UN Conference on Climate Change and Official Statistics, Oslo, Norway, 14-16 April.

Chen, R.S., J. Schumacher, R.L. Weaver, and W.C. Lenhardt. 2007. Assessing the scientific benefits of Earth observations through citation analysis. Poster Paper, Fall meeting, American Geophysical Union, San Francisco CA, 12 December.

de Sherbinin, A., R.S. Chen, and M. Levy. 2007. What does climate change mean for the hazards community? Natural Hazards Observer XXXI (6):11–13.

Downs, R.R., R.S. Chen, W.C. Lenhardt, W. Bourne, and D. Millman. 2007. Cooperative management of a long-term archive of heterogeneous scientific data. Proceedings of Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation and Value Adding to Scientific and Technical Data (PV 2007), Oberpfaffenhofen/Munich, Germany, 9-11 October.

Chen, R.S., R.R. Downs, and W.C. Lenhardt. 2007. Government-University Collaboration in Long-Term Archiving of Scientific Data. Workshop on Science Archives in the 21st Century, University of Maryland, Adelphi MD, 25-26 April.

Arnold, M., R.S. Chen, U. Deichmann, M. Dilley, A.L. Lerner-Lam, R.J. Pullen, and Z. Trohanis, eds. 2006. Natural disaster hotspots case studies. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

Chen, R.S. 2006. Position Paper: Top three issues in the long-term preservation, management, and curation of scientific data in digital format. In To stand the test of time: Long-term stewardship of digital data sets in science and engineering. Arlington, Virginia: Association of Research Libraries, p. 122.

Chen, R.S., and E. Sydor, eds. 2006. Where the poor are: An atlas of poverty. Palisades, NY: CIESIN, Columbia University.

de Sherbinin, A., and R.S. Chen. 2006. Global change: Revealing humanity’s impact on the environment. Earth Imaging Journal (May/June):12–17.

Downs, R.R. and R.S. Chen. 2005. Organizational needs for managing and preserving geospatial data and related electronic records. Data Science Journal 4 (December 31): 255-271. Release Date: January 25, 2006. http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dsj/4/0/4_255/_article.

Iwata, S., and R.S. Chen. 2005. Science and the digital divide (editorial). Science 310 (October 21):405.

Dilley, M., R.S. Chen, U. Deichmann, A.L. Lerner-Lam, M. Arnold with J. Agwe, P. Buys, O. Kjekstad, B. Lyon, and G. Yetman. 2005. Natural disaster hotspots: A global risk analysis. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

de Sherbinin, A., and R.S. Chen, eds. 2005. Global Spatial Data and Information User Workshop.  Palisades, NY: SEDAC/CIESIN.