Robert K. Kaufmann is director and full professor in the Center for Energy & Environmental Studies at Boston University. Before coming to the Center, he was an economist at the WEFA Group and Chase Econometrics and a research scientist at Complex Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. He received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and a BS from Cornell University in 1979.
Professor Kaufmann teaches several undergraduate classes on energy and the environment, including Introduction to Environmental Science, Intermediate Environmental Science, and a course on environmental history. At the graduate level, he teaches classes on resource and environmental economics, ecological economics, and applied time series econometrics.
In addition to Environmental Science, Professor Kaufmann has written two other books, several book chapters, and more than sixty peer review papers on topics ranging from world oil markets, global climate change, and land-use change to the global carbon cycle and ecological economics. Appearing in a variety of natural and social science journals, including Science, Nature, and Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, these papers have been cited more than 900 times and have won awards from the International Association of Energy Economists, Scientific American, and the US Wildlife Federation.
Professor Kaufmanns research efforts have been funded by about one million dollars in grants from institutions such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation. In addition to doing consulting work for Nomura Securities, the European Central Bank, the World Bank, and the US Department of Energy, Professor Kaufmann has also served as a panel member for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NASA Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Steering Committee, and the Project LINK Modeling Center, which maintains a global econometric model for the United Nations.
