Chris Rea (pronounced "ray") is an assistant professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. His research focuses on ways that institutions and organizations shape environmental governance, politics, and regulation, with the aim of understanding and informing interventions into some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, species extinction, and environmental justice.
Rea was formerly a member of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and Department of Sociology (by courtesy) at The Ohio State University and, before that, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) at Brown. Rea earned his doctorate in sociology at UCLA and has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. He was among the last cohort of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) fellowship awardees. He remains an active alumnus of the Summer Institute on Organizational Effectiveness at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Along with Jeff Colgan and Jennifer Hadden, he is a core faculty member of the Climate Solutions Lab housed within the Watson Institute at Brown. He is the founding principal investigator of the Rea Environment and Society Lab (RESL).
