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SIPA Faculty
Sara Tjossem
International Affairs Building, Room 1316
Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-0424
sft2101@columbia.edu
Biography:
Sara Tjossem is a lecturer in SIPA and is affiliated with the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Her teaching and research interests are on the intersection of science and society, the history of biology (particularly in the twentieth century), history of ecology and agriculture, marine science, and development of environmental movements.
Sara Tjossem's most recent publication is The Journey to PICES: Scientific Cooperation in the North Pacific (Alaska Sea Grant Press 2005). This book traces the events and explores the impediments to the eventual formation of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization in 1992. PICES is now the premier intergovernmental marine organization for the Pacific Ocean, promoting and coordinating advances in marine science.
Other of Professor Tjossem's publications are "Scientific Cooperation in the North Pacific: The PICES Project," with Warren S. Wooster in Multilateralism and International Ocean-Resources Law, which was edited by Harry N. Scheiber and Kathryn J. Mengerink (Law of the Sea Institute 2004) and a review of A Dame Full of Vim and Vigor: A Biography of Alice Middleton Boring, Biologist in China by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie and Clifford J. Choquette in Isis (December 2003).
She earned her BA from Swarthmore College in 1983, her MS in ecology and evolutionary biology in 1990, and her PhD in history of science in 1994 (EEB), both from Cornell University. She taught history of science at the University of Minnesota from 1995 to1998 and was assistant director of the Institute of Social, Economic and Ecological Sustainability (ISEES) from 1996 to1998. From 1998 to 2003 she was lecturer and capstone instructor in history and in the Program on the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle.