James (Jim) Buizer serves as Senior Strategy Advisor to the Senior Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Impact (RII). He is professor of Climate Adaptation and International Development in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and Associate Director of the Aegis Consortium for a Pandemic Free Future.  He was founding director of the Arizona Institute for Environments and Societies.

Jim serves as senior advisor to the RII Faculty Foresight Committee, on the steering committee for the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges, and on the Biosphere2 board of directors, among other roles at the university.  He has served on numerous national and environmental and higher education nonprofit boards, including as chairman of the boards at the Global Council for Science and the Environment, and Second Nature, Inc.  He has also served in authorship roles for U.S. National Climate Assessments and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From 2003-2011 Jim served as Senior Advisor for Institutional Transformation to the president at Arizona State University, where he led the design and establishment of the Global Institute of Sustainability. Prior to ASU, Jim was director of the Climate and Societal Interactions Division at NOAA in Washington, D.C., where he was responsible for designing and leading interdisciplinary climate research and applications programs.

He has worked in over 20 countries throughout his career and has published extensively on institutionalizing the science-to-action interface, integrating climate information into decision processes, and climate assessments. His degrees are in Oceanography, Marine Policy and Economics from the University of Washington, Seattle.