Alexander Van Geen's research focuses on reducing the impact of the environment on human health. A theme that runs through his current projects (e.g. arsenic or fluoride in groundwater in South Asia, bauxite dust in Guinea, or soil contaminated with lead from mining in Peru) is that patterns of contamination are spatially very heterogeneous. This complicates prediction but often also points the way to mitigation when the hazard can be mapped. For this reason, he promotes the more widespread use of field kits by non-specialists. He collaborates with public health and social scientists to evaluate how such kits can be deployed at scale and has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers on this and other environmental topics. He holds a research professor appointment at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is a member of the Earth Institute faculty at Columbia University.
