Asim Zia has made substantive scientific and policy contributions towards advancing the Sustainability and Resilience of Human Environmental Systems. He is an internationally known leader in developing computational models of Social Ecological Systems, Complex Adaptive Systems and Governance Networks. Foresight generated from these computational models is used widely to enable early warnings of systemic risks, design early actions and anticipatory policies, configure governance systems and implement adaptive management. He has published 83 journal articles, 20 book chapters and 3 books, totaling 106 peer-reviewed publications. His articles have appeared in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Environmental Research Letters, Global Environmental Change, Ecology and Society, Public Understanding of Science, Public Administration Review, Earth’s Future, Scientific Reports, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, PLOS One, Energy Policy, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Journal of Environmental Management, Conservation Biology and Sustainability.
He has served as a Principal Investigator, Co-Principal Investigator, or Senior Personnel on 26 research grants worth more than $70 Million. Grant funds have been secured from National Science Foundation, McArthur Foundation, US Department of Transportation, US Department of Defense, US Department of Commerce and US Department of Agriculture.  He has served a 3-year term on scientific review committee of the national socio-environmental synthesis center (SESYNC), acting as an academic editor for PLOS One since 2014, and serving as co-editor-in-chief of Complexity, Governance and Networks . He has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology; recipient of 2004-2005 best dissertation award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (2004-2006), a fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment and a senior research fellow for the Earth System Governance project. He was recently appointed as a Fulbright Global Scholar (2021-2023) to lead a project on “Securing Clean Water in Transboundary Indus, Jordan and Amazon Basins through Science and Environmental Diplomacy.” Asim Zia is serving as a Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Vermont (UVM). He is Director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS), a founding Co-Director of the Social Ecological Gaming and Simulation (SEGS) lab and Director of PhD program in Sustainable Development Policy, Economics and Governance at the University of Vermont. Most recently, he has been appointed as Associated Dean of Research and Post-Graduate Education in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.