Matt Burgess is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies, an affiliate faculty in Economics, a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and the director of the Center for Social and Environmental Futures at the University of Colorado Boulder. His academic training is a mixture of ecology and economics. Burgess received his Ph.D. in 2014 at the University of Minnesota in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, where he supplemented his training with graduate coursework in Applied Economics. His research focuses on economic growth futures and their impacts on the environment and society, mathematical modeling of human-environment systems, and political polarization of environmental issues.