Ravi Rajan is a humanist and social scientist, whose research focuses on environmental issues in governance, corporate responsibility, globalization, entrepreneurship, technology choice, and risk and disaster management.

Educated at Delhi (BA Mathematics, MA, Philosophy); Oxford (D.Phil., Environmental History); Berkeley (post doc in Geography); Cornell (post doc in Science and Technology Studies and Global Environmental Studies) and the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, (post doc in Environmental History and Science and Technology Studies), he is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Provost of College Eight.

Rajan has served on the editorial board of Environment and History, as Program Chair for the 2003 Annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History; as a manuscript referee for several leading academic journals and presses, and as a referee for renowned research agencies such as the National Science Foundation.

Rajan has also served as the President of the Board of Directors of Pesticide Action Network, North America (PANNA); on the Board of International Media Project, which produces the weekly radio news program, Making Contact; and as a member of the city of Santa Cruz’s Green Building Committee. He co-founded, the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, a documentation and information center on the gas disaster, in 1985, and served on the core group of the Indian environmental action group, Kalpavriksh, during the 1980s. Rajan also writes periodic essays in the popular news media.