Roberta Balstad

Research

Roberta Balstad is director of Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), principal investigator (PI) and member of the Executive Committee of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), co-PI of the Earth Institute Advance Program, and member of the Executive Committee and Advisory Board of the Cooperative Institute on Climate Applications and Research (CICAR). She recently served as chair of the Panel for the Priority Area Assessment of Science and Technology Data of the International Council of Science (ICSU). Currently she is chair of the U.S. National Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and co-chair of the Panel on Applications and Societal Benefits of the Natural Resource Council (NRC) decadal study, Earth Sciences and Applications from Space. Balstad has published extensively on science policy, information technology and scientific research, human interactions in the environment, and remote sensing applications and policy. Her publications have been translated into French, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and was previously the director of the Division of Social and Economic Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and the OGC Interoperability Institute; treasurer of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI); and member of the NRC Committee on Earth System Science for Decisions about Human Welfare. Balstad also serves as chair of St. Antony's College Trust of Oxford University in North America.

Selected Work

• Roberta Balstad, "Satellite Data" in The Limits of Markets, edited by Richard Nelson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming, 2005).
• Roberta Balstad Miller and Christopher Small, Cities from Space: Potential Applications of Remote Sensing in Urban Environmental Research and Policy, Environmental Science & Policy (2003) 6:129-137
• Robin E. Bell, Kim A. Kastens, Mark Cane, Roberta Balstad Miller, John C. Mutter, and Stephanie Pfirman, Righting the Balance: Gender Diversity in the Geosciences, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, (2003) 84(31): 292-293
• Roberta Balstad Miller, The Crisis of the Social Sciences in 1980, Revue pour l'histoire du CNRS (November 2002)
• Richard Goody, James Anderson, Thomas Karl, Roberta Balstad Miller, Gerald North, Joanne Simpson, Graeme Stephens, and Warren Washington, Why Monitor the Climate?, Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society (June, 2002)
• Roberta Balstad Miller, Social Science and the Challenge of Global Environmental Change, reprinted in French and English in the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of International Social Science Journal (September 1998) 157:447-454

See Also

• Research grant: Center for Research on Environmental Decisions
• Newsletter article: New NSF-Funded Center for Research on Environmental Decisions
• Press release: Center for Research on Environmental Decisions Launched