Prof. Thomas Dietz

Biography

Prof. Dietz is a human ecologist and environmental sociologist. His research focuses on the drivers of environmental change and human well-being, on the social psychology of environmental decision making and on the interplay between science and values in decision making. He was Founding Director of the Environmental Science and Policy Programme at Michigan State University (MSU), where he remains active in the Animal Studies Program and at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. Prof. Dietz has served as Chair of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change and as Vice-chair of the Committee on Advancing the Science of Climate Change. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been awarded the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. In 2017, he delivered the Mitchell Lecture on Sustainability at the University of Maine and was named University Distinguished Professor at MSU. His current research involves integrating measures of human well-being and anthropogenic environmental stress into models of sustainability, and integration of work on consumption in ways useful for policy guidance.