Elke U. Weber is the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Psychology and Earth Institute Professor at Columbia University. Her MA and PhD are from Harvard University in Behavior and Decision Analysis. Over the past 25 years, she has held other academic positions in the United States (University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Ohio State University) and visiting appointments in Europe (London Business School, Copenhagen Business School, Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Corporate Management). She also spent time as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.
She is an expert on behavioral models of decision-making under risk and uncertainty, investigating psychologically and neurally plausible ways to model individual differences in risk taking and discounting, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decisions. At Columbia, she founded and co-directs the Center for the Decision Sciences (CDS), which fosters and facilitates cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in the basic and applied decision sciences and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which investigates ways of facilitating human adaptation to climate change and climate variability and recently published a Climate Change Communications Guide (cred.columbia.edu/Guide).
Weber is past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Society for Neuroeconomics. She has edited two major decision journals, serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals and on advisory committees of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences related to human dimensions in global change, and is a lead author in Working Group III for the 5th Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).