Alexander M. De Sherbinin

Dr. Alex de Sherbinin is CIESIN’s director and also serves as manager of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). He is a geographer whose research interests focus on the human aspects of global environmental change and geospatial data applications, integration, and dissemination. He has authored or co-authored more than 75 journal articles, and is the lead author of articles appearing in Annual Reviews of Environment and Resource, Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, Global Environmental Change, Science, and Scientific American. He serves as section chief editor on Climate Mobility for Frontiers in Climate. His research centers on climate vulnerability mapping; climate change and migration; environmental indicators; citizen science data; and remote sensing applications. He is a co-author of the World Bank’s Groundswell report series, and the biennial Environmental Performance Index (EPI), and teaches in Columbia’s Climate & Society and Sustainability Science master’s degree programs.

Dr. de Sherbinin currently serves as a Council member of the American Geographical Society (AGS), and served as a member then chair of the World Data System (WDS) scientific committee from 2015 to 2022. He has served on many other scientific and advisory committees for data and research programs in the US and Europe.

Alex de Sherbinin holds a PhD in geo-information science and Earth observation from ITC at the University of Twente (Netherlands), and MA and BA degrees in geography from Syracuse University and Dartmouth College, respectively. Prior to joining CIESIN, he served as a USAID-funded Population-Environment Fellow with the Social Policy Program of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN, Gland, Switzerland), and a Population Geographer at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB, Washington DC).

He has profiles on ResearchGate and LinkedIn, and blog postings through the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog. A full list of articles is available on ORCID. See also Dr. de Sherbinin's profile on Columbia Climate School's main website.