Dr. Asim Zia is currently serving as Interim Chair and as a Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont. Dr. Zia is undertaking NSF funded work on developing computational integrated assessment models that project and quantify high-resolution impacts of global climate change and land-use land cover change on watershed scale hydrological systems and lake systems, and their feedbacks on social systems. Dr. Zia has published widely on international climate policy, management of social ecological systems, risk communication, risk management, international development, tropical forest conservation, and adaptation to climate change in the US, Latin American, African and Asian contexts. He is also working on grant funded projects pertaining to mainstreaming early warning systems in development and planning processes; spatial planning, optimization and control to ensure food, energy and water security in the face of climate change induced extreme events, and designing institutions and governance networks to assess and mitigate risks from environmental, social and political drivers of change.  Asim Zia has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles/book chapters and three books. Most recently, Rutledge Press published his book “Post-Kyoto Climate Governance: Confronting the Politics of Scale, Ideology and Knowledge.” He has served as a Principal Investigator, Co-Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on sixteen research grants worth more than $55 Million. Grant funds have been secured from National Science Foundation, McArthur Foundation, US-DOT, US-DoD and USDA.  He serves on scientific review board of national socio-environmental synthesis center (SESYNC), acts as an academic editor for PLOS One, associate editor of Complexity, Governance and Networks and editorial board member of Journal of Policy and Complex Systems. He has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology; and recipient of 2004-2005 best dissertation award from Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. He has also served in the civil superior services of Pakistan as part of 21st common training program (1993-94) and worked for Economic Affairs Division in the Federal Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs (1995-2000), administering bilateral and multilateral developmental assistance projects from Germany, Asian Development Bank, US-AID and Aus-Aid.