UNU-IAS Board Member; Professor and Director General at the Ecological Monitoring Centre (CSE)
Cheikh Mbow is a Professor and Director General at the Ecological Monitoring Centre (Centre de Suivi Ecologique (CSE)) in Senegal, and Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University (MSU). His work focuses on natural resources management, capacity building, and translation of scientific information to decision makers and various stakeholder groups.
Prof. Mbow holds a PhD in Remote Sensing and Forestry from the University of Dakar and Copenhagen University. He carried out his postdoctoral studies in Canada in 2002–2003.
From 2019 to 2021, Prof. Mbow served as the Director of Future Africa at the University of Pretoria, where he led scientific programmes on transdisciplinary research. He was an Associate Professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences, an interdisciplinary institute of the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (UCAD) in Senegal, where he led a research team on climate change, adaptation and environmental risks. He also served as a Senior Scientist on Climate Change at the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) in Kenya, and the Executive Director of START International in USA, a think tank for global environmental change research and capacity building in Africa and Asia.
Throughout his career, he served as a lead scientist in various regional and global programmes, such as the Global Observation of Forest Cover and Land Degradation (GOFC-GOLD), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Future Earth, and the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP).
With approximately 200 publications on various sustainability issues, Prof. Mbow has made significant contributions to transdisciplinary research on food security and sustainable production in Africa.