Rate My Professor Chuan Liao

Dr. Chuan Liao is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. As a human-environment scientist, his research focuses on environment, development, and sustainability. He earned a BS in Resource Science from Beijing Normal University in 2010 and an MS and PhD in Natural Resources from Cornell University in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan from 2015 to 2018 and as Assistant Professor at Arizona State University until 2022 before returning to Cornell.

Dr. Liao’s research examines how institutional and technological innovations shape human-environment well-being, with specific domains including agrifood system innovation, sustainable energy transition, global dryland sustainability, and climate change adaptation. He employs quantitative and mixed-methods techniques, including remote sensing, machine learning, and causal inference. His work has appeared in journals such as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, Global Environmental Change, and Landscape Ecology. He served as Editor-in-Chief of World Development from 2021 to 2022 and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Peasant Studies and World Development Sustainability. Dr. Liao was a Coordinating Lead Author for the Transformative Change Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), contributing to a team recognized with the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture.