A wide range of visitors met with CIESIN staff in April. At the Columbia University Morningside campus April 13, associate directors Alex de Sherbinin and Greg Yetman and deputy director Marc Levy hosted Willie Schubert, program officer with the Earth Journalism Network (EJN). They discussed various resources useful for journalists, including Web technologies, data layers, and map tools available from CIESIN and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). On April 20, CIESIN director Robert Chen participated in a visit by Joreg Mayer-Ries from the German Ministry of the Environment, organized by the Earth Institute. The meeting included discussions about sustainability policy and science in Germany and the United States and in context of the post-2015 development agenda. Both Mayer-Ries and Chen subsequently participated in the conference, "Measuring Sustainable Development: How Can Science Contribute to Realizing the SDGs?" at German House in New York City April 23–24.
Umar Serajuddin, Emi Suzuki, and Dereje Ketema Wolde from the Development Data Group (DDG) of the World Bank visited CIESIN at the Lamont campus April 22–23 to explore collaborative activities and access population data resources from the NASA SEDAC. Suzuki gave an informal presentation April 22 on some of the DDG′s current activities on subnational data development, poverty mapping, and sustainability indicators.
Two recent visits were arranged by the Alliance Program, the academic joint-venture between Columbia and three French institutions, the École Polytechnique (EP), Sciences Po, and Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Chen, Yetman, information scientist Xiaoshi Xing, and program manager Alex Fischer met with Mathieu Le Traon, EP vice president for international relations, and two colleagues April 24 on the Morningside campus. CIESIN has hosted interns from EP for more than six years. On April 28, CIESIN hosted a delegation of five experts from the EDF group in France, led by Bernard Salha, senior executive vice president and head of EDF Research and Development, to discuss areas of potential collaboration, especially those related to urban adaptation and mitigation in response to climate change.
CIESIN also gave a briefing April 28 for several students and two faculty members from the Global Health certificate program of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia′s Mailman School of Public Health (MSPH). And on April 30, CIESIN geospatial information specialist Malanding Jaiteh hosted a visit by Lucy Waruingi, executive director of the African Conservation Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss the availability and application of biodiversity data and information.