Our Team
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The Research Program is led by Dr. Steven Cohen, the Senior Vice Dean of Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a Professor in the Practice of Public Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He is also Director of the Master of Public Administration Program in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. He is a consultant, former policy analyst, and former member of the Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology for the U.S. EPA. He is a graduate of Franklin College of Indiana (1974) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (MA, 1977; PhD, 1979). Cohen is the author of several books, including Environmentally Sustainable Growth: A Pragmatic Approach (2023), The Sustainable City, 2nd ed. (2021), Sustainability Policy: Hastening the Transition to a Cleaner Economy (2015), Understanding Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (2014), and Sustainability Management (2011), and writes regularly on issues of sustainability management and environmental policy. You can sign up for his blog distribution list here. His upcoming book, Sustainability Metrics and Sustainability Management: The Role of Sustainability in Competent Management, is forthcoming publication in 2025. Dr. Cohen views the forthcoming research as a necessary next step in moving the needle towards more rigorous sustainability initiatives.
Satyajit Bose teaches sustainable investing, cost benefit analysis and mathematics, and serves as Associate Director of the Program in Sustainability Management. His research interests include the value of ESG information, carbon pricing, the link between portfolio investment and sustainable development in emerging markets and the optimal use of environmental performance metrics for long horizon investment choices. He is co-author (with Dong Guo and Anne Simpson) of The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.
Satyajit has extensive expertise in investment banking, asset management, financial restructuring and automated weather risk management. Among other positions, he was a mergers & acquisitions banker, directed quantitative trading strategies at a convertible arbitrage hedge fund managing $1.5 billion in assets and developed machine learning algorithms to optimize weather-based decision tools.
Dr. GUO Dong is an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and Associate Director of the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. He received his PhD in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Guo’s expertise lies in impact and evaluation methods and his dissertation focused on the labor market returns to public education spending in China. Guo also received a BSc in Economics from University College London, UK, and holds an MPA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He has conducted significant research on China, including on the reform and practice of the Chinese rural taxation system. Guo is currently working on evaluations of sustainability programs, development of sustainability indicators and frameworks in China, and expanding the Research Program’s work into China. He co-authored the book, with Dr. Satyajit Bose and Anne Simpson, The Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability (2019).
Christoph Meinrenken is Professor of Practice in Columbia's Faculty of Professional Studies, Principal Investigator at the Climate School, Academic Director of the M.S. degree in Information & Knowledge Strategy, and Affiliate of the Foundations of Data Science Center at the Data Science Institute. Meinrenken also co-chairs the Columbia University Seminar on Complexity Science, Modeling and Sustainability.
His research focuses on computer modeling to elucidate and improve the techno-economic performance of low carbon energy systems. Recent and current research projects include electricity arbitrage in smart buildings (DoE, NSF, NYSERDA, NIST), electrification of the transportation sector, synthetic fuels (ABB, Electricity de France), and automated product carbon footprinting (PepsiCo Inc., IBM). An expert in Life Cycle Assessment and enterprise-scale product analytics, he has worked with the World Resources Institute, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and The Sustainability Consortium, and consulted several globally operating consumer goods manufacturers.
Before joining Columbia, Meinrenken worked on modeling molecular spectra (MSE, Princeton University, 1996) and computational neuroscience (PhD Physics, Max Planck Institute, 2001). In addition to academic research and teaching, Meinrenken spent several years in the private sector, specializing in financial engineering and risk management.
Dr. Anyi Wang is an Associate Research Scholar with the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. He is a recent graduate from the PhD program in economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. During his doctoral study, Anyi worked at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, and was key member of several projects evaluating the cost-benefit of educational interventions in the U.S. His research interests include renewable energy policy, shadow pricing and willingness to pay, as well as issues on school quality, educational equity, vocational education in China, and education for children of migrant workers in China. Dr. Wang also holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in Financial Accounting from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.