BIO
Joel E. Cohen is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at The Rockefeller University and Columbia University, New York. He studies populations, ecosystems, and environments using mathematical, statistical, and computational tools. His work focuses on human health, other species humans interact with, and the human environment. Recent examples include food webs, insect-borne infections, tornadoes, and human population dynamics. Cohen has used modeling to make projections about asbestos-related injuries, future population growth, international migration, and lifespan. He has published 14 books, including How Many People Can the Earth Support? and a book of scientific and mathematical jokes, and more than 430 scientific papers and chapters. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Project Syndicate, Discover, Scientific American, and New York Review of Books. His video introduction to demography, An Introduction to Demography and Population Study through an Examination of the World’s Population (Youtube), has been viewed more than 200,000 times. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Cohen earned two doctorates at Harvard University, one in applied mathematics and another in population sciences and tropical public health.