Leadership

The College of Global Futures is led by internationally renowned authorities with distinctive insights in and around the critical areas of sustainability, innovation and planetary systems research. This community of global scholars is uniquely equipped to guide the student experience and address the most critical challenges of our world, now and into the future.

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Peter Schlosser is one of the world’s leading Earth scientists, with expertise in Earth’s hydrosphere and how humans affect the planet’s natural state. Prior to Arizona State University, he was at Columbia University as the chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and the deputy director and director of research at the Earth Institute.

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Miki Caul Kittilson is Vice Dean for the College of Global Futures. She is a leading researcher and educator in democratic inclusion, comparative political behavior, gender justice, and women’s representation in governance. She has authored four university press books, along with numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and invited book chapters. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, USAID and the AAUW. She serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Politics and recently contributed to the design of the Gender Equality and Governance Index (GEGI) from the Global Governance Forum.

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Sharon Hall is Associate Dean for the College of Global Futures. Named a President’s Professor in 2022, Sharon’s teaching and research demonstrate her dedication and commitment to the success of undergraduate and graduate students and strongly align with the mission of our college. As many of you know, she is an ecosystem scientist who explores the ecology of native and managed ecosystems that sustain people and other organisms within the community of life. Through her lab, Sharon and her students investigate ways to build a brighter, more diverse and inclusive pathway for the next generation of conservation scientists. Sharon has also helped guide several efforts to increase access, equity, diversity, inclusion and excellence since joining the faculty at ASU in 2005, including serving as the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Fellow for Institutional Transformation, the Special Advisor to the Director on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the School of Life Sciences, as well as co-PI on the ASU ADVANCE grant. Sharon has been honored with several teaching awards, including the Founders Day Faculty Teaching Award and Zebulon Pearce Distinguished Teaching Award.

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Joshua Abbott’s work focuses on the conceptual and econometric modeling of economic-ecological systems, with an emphasis on the incentive effects of alternative institutional structures for resource management. His recent work on resource management of marine ecosystems includes the examination of fisheries bycatch in the North Pacific, and the design of a system of tradable quotas to address recreational overfishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Other areas of interest include the valuation of ecosystem services in urban and suburban environments, habitat and biodiversity conservation, and the water/landscape nexus in urban environments. He works closely with scientists in government, such as the National Marine Fisheries Service and has also consulted with non-governmental organizations such as Environmental Defense. Abbott teaches courses on quantitative modeling, resource economics, and statistical analysis.

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Eusebio Scornavacca is a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, College of Global Futures, and Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University (ASU). He is also Senior Global Futures Scientist at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Prior to joining ASU, Scornavacca was the Parsons Professor of Digital Innovation and Director of the Center for Digital Communication, Commerce and Culture at the University of Baltimore. Eusebio is a global scholar with a strong research collaboration network across six continents. He has held visiting positions in Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, France, Finland, Spain, New Zealand, Morocco, and Brazil. His research interests include disruptive digital innovation, high-impact innovation, innovation policy, digital entrepreneurship, ICT for development, and digital ecosystems. During the past 20 years, he has conducted multidisciplinary research using qualitative and quantitative methods in a wide range of industries, including research sponsored by the private sector. He has also rather extensive experience developing multinational, cross-disciplinary inquiry-based learning projects. Scornavacca’s research has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Information Technology, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the AIS, Information & Management, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Computer Information Systems and Television & New Media. He has held several editorial positions and served as a track chair at leading conferences. 

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Manfred Laubichler is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose work focuses on the structure of evolutionary theory, the evolution of knowledge, and evolutionary novelties — from genomes to knowledge systems. In addition to his ASU appointments, he is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, an external faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, and the vice-chair of the Global Climate Forum. His undergraduate training was in zoology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and his graduate training was in biology at Yale and in history/history of science at Princeton.

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Susanne Neuer, the founding director of the school is a leading biological oceanographer and marine ecologist who has carried out much of her research in the subtropical Atlantic Ocean. As a teacher of oceanography, ecology, environmental life sciences and marine biology, she leads a research group that studies the role of ocean life in the carbon cycle and sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, also called the biological carbon pump. Neuer’s work, which has examined sea ice organisms in the Arctic, the role of microorganisms in colonizing microplastic pollution in the ocean, and harmful algal blooms in local reservoirs, has received funding by the National Science Foundation and NASA.