Professor Graciela Chichilnisky is Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University and Director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management. She is the co-founder and, until 2022, was the CEO of Global ThermostatLink opens in a new window, where she co-created a carbon removal technology that can reverse climate change - an immense step toward successfully mitigating the global carbon cycle. Under Professor Chichilnisky’s leadership, the company was awarded a Silver designation on Pepperdine Graziadio Business School’s 2020 Most Fundable Companies List, and its technology was chosen by MIT Technology Review as one of the Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2019, a list curated by Bill Gates.

As a world-renowned economist and environmental scientist, Professor Chichilnisky has made lasting impacts on environmental law making by creating, designing, and writing the carbon market of the United Nation’s Kyoto Protocol. Professor Chichilnisky also worked as lead US author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Prize in 2007. Both events are documented in Professor Chichilnisky’s two recent books, Reversing Climate Change and Saving Kyoto, which won the American Library Association’s 2010 Outstanding Academic Title of the Year and the American Geographical Society’s Book of the Month Award in October 2009.

As the recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award (2017-2018), Professor Chichilnisky’s research on effective ways of reversing climate change has been recognised to have lasting contributions to society. She was selected in 2017 as a Great Immigrant Honoree: The Pride of America.

She is currently CEO of GT Climate Innovation Inc.