Sustainability Data Intelligence
Matthew Potts, Professor
Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Applications for Spring 2026 are closed for this project.
Despite a surge in sustainability and financial data—from greenhouse gas inventories to climate and nature-related risk metrics—the challenge remains linking sustainability initiatives to financial outcomes. Data is abundant but siloed, limiting its ability to guide decision-making and creating missed opportunities for research, entrepreneurship, and capital deployment. This integration gap is compounded by fragmented regulations and rising geopolitical tensions, as the turn toward isolationism reduces access to reliable cross-border data. Meanwhile, the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss continues to accelerate. Even as government and corporate reporting advances, the connection between environmental performance and financial outcomes remains poorly understood, leaving markets to misprice both risks and opportunities.
The researcher(s) for this position will work to identify and develop novel data-enabled solutions to accurately and efficiently measure and link climate and nature-related data to financial data to provide actionable information to improve decision making.
Role: Responsibilities:
The researcher’s responsibilities will include:
Literature reviews in the area of natural capital, biodiversity, climate and finance.
Interviewing relevant parties working in the space
Collating and collecting as necessary available information and data
Coordinating data management, quality control, and archiving
Developing code, datasets, and applications as appropriate
Qualifications: We are looking for motivated and independent undergraduate students with a broad background in the environmental sciences, biodiversity science, or business. All students should have excellent reading, writing, and organizational skills and those interested in quantitative analyses ideally have a background in data science, AI, programming and/or geospatial skills.
Hours: to be negotiated
Social Sciences Environmental Issues Biological & Health Sciences