Dr. Puma is currently Director of the Center for Climate Systems Research, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. His research efforts are focused on global food security, especially the exploration of how susceptible the global network of food trade is to natural (e.g., megadroughts, volcanic eruptions) and manmade (e.g., wars, trade restrictions) disturbances. He is particularly interested in understanding the limits to predictability for our water and food systems, as we need fundamentally different approaches for problems that are sensitive to non-predictable extremes. His efforts on global food security are supported by a fellowship from the Center for Climate and Life and the Columbia World Project Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today for Tomorrow (ACToday).
Director