Dr. Roberta Balstad

Dr. Balstad (formerly Roberta Balstad Miller) is Senior Research Scientist at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow with CIESIN. Dr. Balstad has published extensively on science policy, information technology and scientific research, remote sensing applications and policy, and the role of the social sciences in understanding global environmental change.  She is the author of numerous articles and books, including City and Hinterland: A Case Study of Urban Growth and Regional Development (1979) and editor, with Harriet Zuckerman, of Science Indicators: Implications for Research and Policy (1980).  Her publications have been translated into French, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. 

Dr. Balstad received the Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1974.  She was a senior fellow at Oxford University in 1991-1992 and a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1994. She is currently chair of the U.S. National Committee on Science and Technology Data (CODATA) and chaired the Priority Area Assessment panel on Scientific Data and Information of the International Council of Science (ICSU). She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the U.S. National Committee for IIASA. Before joining Columbia University, Dr. Balstad was previously the Director of the Division of Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation, the founder and first Executive Director of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), and President/CEO of CIESIN.  In 1998, she led CIESIN's transition from Saginaw, Michigan to become part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where she served as CIESIN's Director through April 2006. She has lectured widely, both in the United States and abroad.  From 1992 to 1994, she was Vice President of the International Social Science Council and has also served as chair of the NRC Steering Committee on Space Applications and Commercialization, the NATO Advisory Panel on Advanced Scientific Workshops/Advanced Research Institutes, the AAAS Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy, and the Advisory Committee of the Luxembourg Income Study.  She currently serves as chair of St. Antony's College Trust (Oxford University) in North America.   She has published translations of the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish) and N.P. van Wyck Louw (Afrikaans).

Recent publications:

Roberta Balstad, “Satellite Data,” in The Limits of Markets, edited by Richard Nelson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming, 2005).

Roberta Balstad Miller, Christopher Small, Cities from Space: Potential Applications of Remote Sensing in Urban Environmental Research and Policy, Environmental Science & Policy, (2003) 6:129-137

Robin E. Bell, Kim A. Kastens, Mark Cane, Roberta Balstad Miller, John C. Mutter, and Stephanie Pfirman, Righting the Balance: Gender Diversity in the Geosciences, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, (2003) 84(31): 292-293

Roberta Balstad Miller, The Crisis of the Social Sciences in 1980, Revue pour l'histoire du CNRS, (November 2002)

Richard Goody, James Anderson, Thomas Karl, Roberta Balstad Miller, Gerald North, Joanne Simpson, Graeme Stephens, and Warren Washington, Why Monitor the Climate?, Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society, (June, 2002)

Roberta Balstad Miller, Social Science and the Challenge of Global Environmental Change, reprinted in French and English in the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of International Social Science Journal, (September 1998) 157:447-454