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PhD in Sustainable Development
Director of Graduate Studies: John Mutter
Co-Directors: Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz
About the Program
The sustainability of development poses many of the most important policy challenges for the future of the planet. None of the central issues can be understood from the sole perspective of a traditional discipline, whether in the social or natural sciences. The Ph.D. in Sustainable Development combines elements of a traditional graduate education in social science, particularly economics, with study in the natural sciences, to prepare graduates who will be uniquely situated to undertake serious research and policy assessments to further the goal of sustainable development. The program includes a set of rigorous core requirements in social and natural sciences, and provides students with the flexibility to pursue in-depth research in a broad variety of critical policy areas, deeply informed by an understanding of the natural processes that interact with social systems. No other doctoral program produces graduates with the unique combination of diverse skills and deep insight into the most challenging problems of future human welfare. Research projects that the students in the program are working on with senior experts at Columbia include climate change and its social consequences, causes and solutions to extreme poverty, energy systems, agricultural transitions, water resources, infectious disease, global demographic change including forced migrations, ecosystems, disasters and conflict. Students also benefit from being part of the Earth Institute¹s suite of research and practice programs that focus on sustainable development.
In 2008 the Ph.D. in Sustainable Development achieved two milestones. In spring 2008, it graduated its first Ph.D., and in fall 2008 it matriculated its fifth entering class, reaching its expected full enrollment of about 25 students (who currently represent 12 countries).
Housed at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), the Ph.D. program continues Columbia's recent initiatives in multidisciplinary doctoral education and also reflects SIPA's longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary graduate social science education for policymakers and analysts.
In just five years our PhD program, with is unique critical emphasis on rigorous scholarship and research at the boundary between social and natural sciences has become the most sought after advanced degree of its kind in the world.