Cynthia Rosenzweig, PhD

Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and World Food Prize Laureate 2022

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the co-located Columbia University Earth Institute’s Center for Climate Systems Research. Dr. Rosenzweig’s specific area of expertise is climate change and food systems. At NASA GISS, she heads the Climate Impacts Group whose mission is to investigate the interactions of climate (both variability and change) on systems and sectors important to human well-being. Dr. Rosenzweig is the co-founder and a member of the Executive Committee of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a globally integrated transdisciplinary study of climate change and the food system at regional, national and global scales, including the participation of over 1000 leading researchers from developed and developing nations. In 2019, Dr. Rosenzweig was Coordinating Lead Author of the Food Security Chapter for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Rosenzweig has developed new methods of detection and attribution of observed changes in physical and biological systems to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and pioneered research on the impacts of and adaptation to climate change and climate variability. She has developed methodologies for the integrated assessment of the climatic and physiological effects of increased CO2 and SO2 on regional, national, and global agricultural production and food security. She has forged scientific knowledge on the role of agriculture in land use and land cover change and advanced critical exploration of teleconnections between the El Niño Southern Oscillation and agriculture at regional and global scales. She has championed innovative research and instituted knowledge networks on global environmental change and urban systems and developed groundbreaking biological and hydrological land-surface processes for global circulation models (GCMs), used in GISS GCM contributions to the IPCC. Dr. Rosenzweig is the 2022 recipient of the World Food Prize, considered as the “Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture.”