On July 21, 2021, the AXA Research Fund announced the four winners of its AXA Awards for Climate Science, including Christian Braneon, a term lecturer in Barnard’s Environmental Science Department. AXA is a French multinational insurance firm, which founded a research fund in 2008 to support research focused on understanding and preventing the risks threatening the environment, human life, and society.
Braneon’s award from AXA is accompanied by a research grant of €50,000 (nearly $60,000), in recognition of his contributions to our understanding of climate change. To date, AXA’s philanthropic arm has awarded more than €46 million ($54 million) in research grants for climate and environment research.
In addition to his position as a visiting professor at Barnard, Dr. Braneon has also served as the Principal Investigator of the Climate Change Research Initiative at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 2018, was appointed to Mayor De Blasio’s leadership team for the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) in 2019, and has published extensive research on the intersection of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.