Laurence C. Smith is the John Atwater and Diana Nelson University Professor of Environmental Studies in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES) and the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS) at Brown University. Previously, he was Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also held a joint appointment in the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. His research interests include the Arctic, water resources, and satellite remote sensing technologies. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, essays and books including in the journals Science, Nature, and PNAS, and won more than $16M in research funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA. In 2006-2007 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and in 2015, he was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). His work has appeared prominently in Assessment Reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is currently assisting NASA with a new satellite mission to monitor global water resources, and the World Economic Forum with social science issues of Arctic development. In 2012, 2014, 2016 he was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.