Who we are and what we do

The Program for the Human Environment recognizes the growing connection between the biological and other research underway at The Rockefeller University and environmental concerns. The Program houses research, organizes meetings on topics of interest to the campus community, hosts visiting scientists in environmental fields, and encourages collaborations between faculty and students. The Program is responsible for communicating widely the scientific results of environmental studies involving the University in an effort to inform environmental practices and policies. It also houses selected studies concerned with the health of the scientific enterprise.

Our core group consists of Perrin Meyer, Mark Stoeckle, Jason Yung, Doris Manville, Veselin Kostov, Smriti Rao, and me, networked with, and (over)stimulated by associates in New Haven, Woods Hole, D.C., California (north & south), Guelph, Laxenburg, Florence, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. We enjoy ongoing association with our alumni, including Nadejda Makarova Victor, Tony Barrett, Iddo Wernick, Andrew Johnson, Peter Elias, and Dionel Lopez.

We continue to explore how long-run technical change relates to productivity and efficiency of energy, materials, land, and other resources, and the consequences for human populations. In essence we seek to elaborate the technical vision of a micro-emissions society. This vision is realized in part by industrial ecology, the study of the network of industrial processes as they interact with each other and live off each other, especially in the sense of direct use of each other's material and energy wastes and products. We work on diverse case studies including zero-emission power plants, nitrogen, and cadmium (an element good for batteries and harmful to health and behavior). In analytical methods, we remain deeply interested in statistical analysis of long time-series of environment-related data, and models of growth and diffusion, especially Lotka-Volterra dynamical systems, which we pursue under the rubric of Loglets ("logistic wavelets"). We believe we can explain a lot of about the last 10,000 years and predict a lot about the next 1,000.

In my concurrent role as a program director with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, I am participating in the organization and conduct of an international research program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans, The Census of Marine Life. Involvement in the marine census brought us in contact with environmental genomics, and we are now exploring and advancing use of very short DNA sequences for species identification, the so-called "Barcode of Life."

Also under Sloan auspices, some of our work continues to examine the scientific and academic enterprise per se. We helped create the first interactive simulation model of a university, Virtual U., a "serious game" now freely available and widely used for educating managers in higher education.

We also help organize the Insight Lectures and Cohn Forum at Rockefeller University.

Jesse H. Ausubel
Director, Program for the Human Environment,
The Rockefeller University, New York, NY

Click here for directions on getting to our office, including maps.