Geoffrey M. Heal

Geoffrey Heal is the Director of the Earth Institute's Center for Economy, Environment, and Society. He previously served as Vice Dean of the Business School and managed the Executive MBA Program.

Heal studied Physics and Economics at Cambridge, where he obtained a First Class Honors degree and a Doctorate, and then taught at Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Princeton, and held a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Sienna. He has acted as Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and has acted on the Editorial Boards of many other journals. In the 1970s he founded a London-based consulting firm, and in the 1980s a firm providing systems for telecommunications and data processing to the international securities business.

Heal's research fields include the management of risks by financial markets, and especially the securitization of catastrophic risks and analysis of the systemic risks associated with the growth of derivative markets. He has worked more generally on the application of mathematical modeling techniques in economic theory. As an extension of this research he has been involved in the design of new financial instruments and acts as an advisor to financial institutions and other corporations. Another major research interest is the interaction between society and its natural resource base. He has been working to formalize and operationalize the concept of sustainability and develop an interdisciplinary group of social and biological scientists committed to research on the interface between the biological and social sciences.

Heal is a member of the Pew Oceans Commission (www.pewoceans.org), a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org) and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has advised the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Mineworkers of America, and used to work as Advisor to the secretary-general of OPEC.