Prof. Graciela Chichilnisky Columbia University, USA

Graciela Chichilnisky worked extensively on the Kyoto Protocol, creating and designing the carbon market that became international law in 2005, and wrote the wording for the carbon market into the Kyoto Protocol at the COP in Kyoto in December 1997. The Washington Post calls her an “A-List Star” and Time... read moreMagazine calls her a “Hero of the Environment”. In 2015 Graciela Chichilnisky was selected “2015 CEO of the Year” by IAIR at the Yale Club in New York City, and Fast Company Magazine selected her company Global Thermostat “World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies” in energy. A professor of Economics and Statistics at Columbia University, NYC, Dr. Chichilnisky is currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the CEO of Global Thermostat.

A world-renowned economist, Chichilnisky is the creator of the formal theory of Sustainable Development and acted as Lead US Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her pioneering work uses innovative market mechanisms to create Green Capitalism. She acts as a special adviser to several UN organizations and heads of state and is CEO and Co-Founder of Global Thermostat, a company in which she co-invented a “Carbon Negative Technology”™ that captures CO2 from air and transforms it into profitable assets such as biofuels, food, beverages, polymers, and valuable building materials. She previously founded and led two successful companies: FITEL, a financial telecommunications company that was sold in Japan, and Cross Border Exchange, a global technology communications company sold to JP Morgan.

At Columbia University Chichilnisky is Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics and a University Senator at Columbia University, and the Director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management , where she has developed a landmark methodology, with support from the U.S. Air Force, for a new foundation of probability and statistics in an approach to catastrophic risks that allows more realistic treatment of rare but important events. She is the author of fifteen books and some 320 scientific articles in preeminent academic journals. Her two most recent books are “The Economics of Climate Change” and “Saving Kyoto.”

Dr. Chichilnisky holds two Ph.D. degrees, in Mathematics and Economics from MIT and University of California Berkeley. She is a frequent political and economic speaker on CNN, ABC, BBC TV News, and Bloomberg News, as well as a frequent keynote speaker at leading international conferences and universities. She taught previously at Harvard, Essex and Stanford Universities, appeared in Time Magazine on “Heroes of the Environment,” and was elected one of the Ten Most Influential Latinos in the US. Chichilnisky has two children and was born in Argentina. She is a US citizen and resides in New York City.