Christoph Meinrenken is Professor of Professional Practice in Columbia’s Faculty of Professional Studies, Principal Investigator at the Climate School, Academic Director of the M.S. degree in Information & Knowledge Strategy, and Affiliate of the Foundations of Data Science Center at the Data Science Institute. Christoph also co-chairs the Columbia University Seminar on Complexity Science, Modeling and Sustainability.

His research focuses on computer modeling to elucidate and improve the techno-economic performance of low carbon energy systems. Recent and current research projects include electricity arbitrage in smart buildings (funded by DoE, NSF, NYSERDA, NIST), electrification of the transportation sector, synthetic fuels (funded by ABB, Electricity de France), and automated product carbon footprinting (funded by PepsiCo Inc., IBM). An expert in Life Cycle Assessment and enterprise-scale sutainability analytics, he has worked with the World Resources Institute, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), and The Sustainability Consortium, and consulted several globally operating consumer goods manufacturers.

Before joining Columbia, Meinrenken worked on modeling molecular spectra (MSE, Princeton University, 1996) and computational neuroscience (PhD Physics, Max Planck Institute, 2001). In addition to academic research and teaching, Meinrenken spent several years in the private sector, specializing in financial engineering and risk management.