Peter Schlosser, PhD

Peter Schlosser is the Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Futures and the University Global Futures Professor at Arizona State University.  He leads the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and is the Director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. He holds joint appointments in the School of Sustainability in the College of Global Futures, the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Dr. Schlosser’s main expertise is in studying the Earth’s hydrosphere and how humans affect the planet’s natural state.  His research focuses on water movement and its variability in natural systems (oceans, lakes, rivers, groundwater) using natural and anthropogenic trace substances and isotopes as ’dyes’ or as ‘radioactive clocks.’ He also studies ocean/atmosphere gas exchange; reconstruction of continental paleotemperature records using groundwater as archive; anthropogenic impact on natural systems and planetary health.

Prior to joining ASU in January 2018, Dr. Schlosser spent twenty-eight years at Columbia University, where he was the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics and Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the deputy director and director of research at the Earth Institute. He also was a member and the founding chair of the Earth Institute faculty and a member of the senior staff at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Before joining Columbia University, he was an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department of the University of Heidelberg.

He serves on numerous national and international science steering and advisory committees, including Co-Chair of the Earth League, Chair of the Steering Group of the International Study of Arctic Change, and member of the Boards of the Sustaining Arctic Observing Network and The Sustainability Consortium. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science, and Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Explorers Club.