Professor Graciela Chichilnisky played a central role in designing and negotiating the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol. She is the director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management and professor of economics and statistics at Columbia University, New York. Chilchilnisky acted as lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change from 1996 to 1999. From 1996 to 2008, she was UNESCO professor of mathematics and economics at Columbia University.