CGSD provides support for a variety of social science initiatives across Columbia University, many of which occur in separate centers of their own. This is a partial list of the principal areas of effort and the organizational framework in which the work is carried out.
Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development
Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR)
Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD)
Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development
The Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development is dedicated to studying processes of technological change, as well as the advance of scientific knowledge that underlies many modern technologies. The program was designed to gain an understanding of the factors that have led to staggering technological advances in fields like communications, computation, transportation, agriculture, and medicine. Another goal is to understand why these advances have been so unevenly distributed between wealthy and poor countries of the world, and to examine the processes through which developing countries may gain access to the scientific and technological knowledge required to narrow the gap.
Center for the Study of Science and Religion
The Center for the Study of Science and Religion was founded in 1999 as a forum for the examination of issues that lie at the boundary of two complementary ways of comprehending the world and our place in it. By examining the boundaries and intersecions of science and religion, the CSSR hopes to stimulate dialogue and promote understanding.
Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD)
The mission of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development is the creation of physically and socially sustainable cities. CSUD's initial project is to establish ongoing research and educational exchanges in three cities in developing countries. Its project work will focus on land use and transport planning, with the goal of designing plans and policies for sustainable growth.
The Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University studies human and non-human populations. To develop concepts helpful for understanding populations, the laboratory is dedicated to studying concrete problems in demography, epidemiology, ecology, and population genetics. A current study investigates the spatial distribution of the Earth's human population in relation to geophysical factors such as elevation, distance from coasts or navigable rivers, temperature, and precipitation.