Geoffrey Heal is Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility and Professor of Economics and Finance at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, where he also served as Vice Dean and managed the Executive MBA Program. He studied Physics and Economics at Cambridge University, where he obtained a First Class Honors degree and a Doctorate. He has previously taught at Cambridge, Stanford, Yale and Princeton, and has acted as Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies. Dr. Heal founded a consulting firm that is based in London and also a firm operating in London, New York and Tokyo specializing in hardware and software systems for telecommunications and data processing in support of international securities trading. Heal is a director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group founded by Physics Nobel Laureate Henry Kendal to promote sound scientific thinking about the environmental problems facing society. In addition he serves as a Commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission, established by the Pew Charitable Trusts to review the management of U.S. fisheries and coastal zones, is a Director of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and an International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute of World Economics.

Dr. Heal's research fields include the management of risks by financial markets, and especially the securitization of catastrophic risks and analysis of the systemic risks associated with the growth of derivative markets. As an extension of this research he has been involved in the design of new financial instruments and acts as an advisor to investment banks and industrial corporations on matters related to risk assessment, risk management and financial markets. Dr. Heal has worked more generally on the application of mathematical modeling techniques in economic theory.

Another major research interest is the interaction between human societies and their natural resource bases. Dr. Heal has been working to formalize and operationalize the concept of sustainability and develop an interdisciplinary and multi-institution group of leading social and biological scientists committed to research on the interface between the biological and social sciences and the investigation of market-based solutions to environmental problems. Heal is Director of Columbia's Center for Economy Environment and Society (CEES).

Recent books include Valuing the Future: Economic Theory and Sustainability (Columbia University Press), Nature and the Marketplace (Island Press), Topological Social Choice (Springer Verlag), Sustainability: Dynamics and Uncertainty (Kluwer) and Environmental Markets (Columbia University Press)