Catherine Kling
Earlier this month, Catherine Kling, professor of environmental, energy and resource economics in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, was one of three faculty members named Tisch University Professors by the Cornell University Board of Trustees, bringing to six the number of current faculty holding the title.
The Tisch University Professorships, one of Cornell’s highest faculty honors, were created in 2008 by Andrew H. Tisch ’71 and Ann Rubenstein Tisch to help attract and retain prominent scholars and midcareer faculty. Awarded at the discretion of the president and provost, the professorships are deployed to address critical recruitment and retention needs, give the university flexibility to pursue new initiatives, and help strengthen and fortify departments and emerging interdisciplinary fields.
“The Tisch Professorships continue to be a tremendous asset for the university that supports recruitment of the most talented faculty in the world, as well as retention and recognition of outstanding researchers and teachers already at Cornell,” said Provost Michael Kotlikoff. “Naming three new Tisch professors this year is both a testament and a commitment to the talent and skill we continue to bring to our colleges and our campuses, and to the academic excellence that is ubiquitous at Cornell.”
Kling, who also joined the faculty in July, is a professor of environmental, energy and resource economics in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and also is a faculty director at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She is the past director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University, where she held the President’s Chair in Environmental Economics.
She specializes in the economic valuation of ecosystem services and integrated assessment modeling for water quality. Kling chairs the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences, has served as president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and was a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board for 10 years.
Kling received a bachelor’s degree in business and economics from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland.
The two other appointed professors were Nicholas Abbott, a professor in the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering and a member of the graduate field faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. and Daniel Lee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech and part time executive vice president at Samsung Research.
Abbott, Kling and Lee join three other Tisch professors: chemist Geoff Coates, computer scientist Jon Kleinberg and computer scientist Lorenzo Alvisi, M.S. ’94, Ph.D. ’96.
