Reuben Kline Appointed Interim Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability Programming

Executive Vice President and Provost Carl W. Lejuez has announced that Reuben Kline has been appointed as interim associate provost for climate and sustainability programming and interim director of Collaborative for the Earth (C4E).

“Kevin Reed, who has served as associate provost for climate and sustainability programming and this spring oversaw the work of the Collaborative for the Earth, will take a much-deserved sabbatical to focus on his research during the upcoming academic year,” Lejuez said in his July 2 announcement. “Particularly relevant to Long Island and other coastal communities, his research aims to quantify changes in extreme rainfall events and associated flood risk.”

Lejuez said Kline’s appointment, effective August 3, 2026, will “maintain our momentum while Kevin is on sabbatical,” adding that he emerged as a candidate based on feedback from the C4E and climate research community.

“The roles of associate provost and director of C4E provide leadership and strategic oversight for our interdisciplinary efforts to address global environmental, climate and energy challenges through campus-wide collaboration,” Lejuez said. “C4E helps to advance the university’s role as a leader in developing innovative, viable solutions to existential risks threatening Earth’s interconnected life-supporting systems. This portfolio also leads initiatives that foster collaboration across academic disciplines and oversees programs that connect scholarship, experiential learning, and public engagement.”

Kline, who joined Stony Brook in 2011, is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, and served as director of the Center for Behavioral Political Economy from 2018 to 2024. He currently serves as director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Political Science.

A political economist and behavioral scientist, Kline specializes in behavioral game theory, strategic responses to climate change and experimental social science. He has published research across several fields, including Nature Climate Change, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Politics, Ecological Economics and Journal of Environmental Psychology. In 2024, with Talbot Andrews and Andrew Delton, he published Climate Games: Experiments on How People Prevent Disaster (University of Michigan Press).

For more than a decade, Kline has been active in climate and sustainability initiatives in both SBU and SUNY, including the SUNY Climate Change STRIVE task force, the advisory board for the Collaborative for the Earth and the Climate Tiger Teams. As director of undergraduate studies, he is helping to create a new interdisciplinary legal studies minor and leading a pilot program for the Division of Undergraduate Education’s initiative to develop a transfer credit evaluation database. He was recently selected as a member of the inaugural cohort of the SUNY Research Leadership Academy.

“Please join me in welcoming Reuben to these roles and thanking Kevin for all his leadership in climate initiatives at Stony Brook, stretching back to the early days of the New York Climate Exchange proposal more than five years ago,” Lejuez said. “Thanks to the work of Kevin and Heather Lynch, the inaugural director of C4E, we are well positioned to continue shaping what comes next for Stony Brook as a climate and sustainability leader, with Reuben leading these efforts for the next academic year.”