Alex Halliday, Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School

Alex Halliday is the Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Founding Dean of the new Columbia Climate School. He joined Columbia in April 2018, after spending more than a decade at the University of Oxford, during which time he was dean of science and engineering. With over 400 published research papers, Halliday has been a pioneer in developing mass spectrometry to measure small isotopic variations in everything from meteorites to seawater to living organisms, helping to shed light on the birth and early development of our solar system, the interior workings of the Earth, and the processes that affect Earth’s surface environment. His scientific achievements have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society, the Bowen Award and Hess Medal of the American Geophysical Union, the Urey Medal of the European Association of Geochemistry, the Oxburgh Medal of the Institute of Measurement and Control, and a Knighthood for services to science and innovation. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Halliday has helped to lead a variety of distinguished scientific societies and advisory panels. He is the former Vice President of the Royal Society and former President of the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry, and the Volcanology, Geochemistry and Petrology Section of the American Geophysical Union. He has served as an external board member for Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council, the Max Planck Society, London’s Natural History Museum, the American Geophysical Union, and more. As a professor in Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Halliday divides his time between Columbia’s Morningside campus and his isotope geochemistry lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The main focus of his current activities is establishing the Columbia Climate School, a major new initiative in transdisciplinary research, education and societal engagement, focused on climate and related sustainability issues. Follow BITBA on Twitter and Instagram.

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