CIESIN is pleased to announce that Alex de Sherbinin has been appointed the new Director of CIESIN as of March 26, 2024, following an open search. Dr. de Sherbinin is CIESIN’s fourth director since its founding in 1989. Dr. de Sherbinin first joined CIESIN in 1999 as Senior Staff Associate and was promoted to Senior Research Scientist in 2020. In 2015, he was appointed Associate Director for Science Applications, and in 2022 he was promoted to Deputy Director. Since 2008 he has served as deputy manager of CIESIN’s largest project, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), and in 2023 he became SEDAC manager.
Dr. de Sherbinin has served as principal investigator (PI) on 33 projects totaling $37m in funding, and a co-PI on 15 projects totaling $71m in funding, for a total of $108m in funding from a diverse set of sponsors such as NASA, NSF, US Agency for International Development, the World Bank, as well as various foundations and UN agencies. He has been lead or co-author of multiple reports and more than 75 journal articles, including lead authored articles in Science, Global Environmental Change, WIRES Climate Change, Climatic Change, Annual Reviews, The Geographical Journal, and Environmental Research Letters.
Speaking of his appointment, Dr. de Sherbinin said “CIESIN is in an excellent position to capitalize on a number of opportunities in spatial data science and open science. As the home of geography and geographic information science at Columbia, it brings the geographers' strengths of interdisciplinary research, place-based approaches, and geospatial toolkits to the Climate School and to our collaborators across multiple schools. It also has a diverse portfolio of research and data-related projects. As a committed ‘CIESINite’, I’m delighted to lead the center as it builds on its reputation for excellence in research, data production, data management, and applying data for decision making.”
Under de Sherbinin’s leadership, CIESIN recently completed a strategic planning exercise, and that plan will be published to the CIESIN website in the coming months.
