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Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky  

Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics; Director, Columbia University; Columbia Consortium for Risk Management

Dr. Graciela Chichilnisky has worked extensively in the United Nations Kyoto Protocol process, creating and designing the carbon market that has become international law in 2005, www.chichilnisky.com. Working closely for several years with negotiators of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization in charge of deciding world policy with respect to global warming, Dr. Chichilnisky acted as a US lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Prize for their work in this area. In 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed by 163 nations, Dr. Chichilnisky authored the Protocol language that led to the creation of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme now trading $200 Bn per year, and other carbon markets that is mandatory in four continents including the state of California in the U.S.

Dr. Chichilnisky was founder and CEO of two successful technology companies in the financial telecommunications area, based on the IP she created and patented, which she sold in Japan and in the US. She is currently the co-founder and CEO of Global Thermostat www.globalthermostat.com a company that has developed and is commercializing a unique technology for the direct capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and other sources. In addition to her extensive management experience, she is an active scientist and acts as a special adviser to several UN organizations and heads of state. Her pioneering work uses innovative market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions, conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services.

She is the author of the formal theory of Sustainable Development and the creator of the concept of Basic Needs that is the cornerstone of sustainable development. The author of fifteen books and some 250 scientific articles published in the preeminent academic journals covering economics, finance and mathematics, Dr. Chichilnisky is a frequent keynote speaker in academia, public events and the media and speaks extensively on finance, mathematics, globalization and the global environment.

She is a tenured professor of Economics and in Mathematical Statistics and a University Senator at Columbia University in New York, the Director of the Columbia's Consortium for Risk Management www.columbiariskmanagement.net and a Distinguished Guest Professor at the Normal University of Beijing and Nankai University in China. Dr Chichilnisky has no college degree. She studied at MIT and UC Berkeley and holds two Ph.D. degrees in pure Mathematics and in Economics respectively, and taught at Harvard, Essex and Stanford Universities. She was born in Argentina and has two children, a US citizen and lives in New York City.

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