Christopher Boone

Biography

Christopher G. Boone is the Dean and the C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair for the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. At the USC Price School, he holds an academic appointment as a Professor of Public Policy. Born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he graduated from Queen’s University with a BA (honours) in Geography. He received a master’s and PhD degree in Geography from the University of Toronto, focusing his research on Brazilian urbanization, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of the Environment at McGill University. His research contributes to scholarship and practice in sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, urban ecology, global environmental change, and higher education innovation.

For nearly two decades, he was a co-pi and senior scientist for two Long Term Ecological Research programs, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER. He served on the scientific steering committee of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Programme (an IHDP and Future Earth project) and was a board member for the Global Council for Science and the Environment, dedicated to advancing the scientific basis for environmental decision-making.

He is a co-founder, past president, and executive committee member of the National Sustainability Society, an organization created to develop sustainability as a coherent, transdisciplinary scholarly field, support the growth of sustainability programs in colleges and universities, and convene and connect sustainability researchers, practitioners, employers, and graduates. For the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, he serves on the executive committee.

Before joining USC, Boone was the Dean of the School of Sustainability and Founding Dean of the College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. He has held visiting professor positions in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University and in the Yale School of the Environment.