Announcing Climate Leadership Updates

Reuben Kline appointed interim Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability Programming, interim C4E director

July 2, 2026

Dear Stony Brook Faculty and Staff Colleagues,

I am sharing updates on leadership of our climate initiatives in Academic Affairs.

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 (C4E), will take a much-deserved sabbatical to focus on his research during the upcoming academic year. Particularly relevant to Long Island and other coastal communities, his research aims to quantify changes in extreme rainfall events and associated flood risk.

To maintain our momentum while Kevin is on sabbatical, I am pleased to announce the appointment of Reuben Kine as interim Associate Provost for Climate and Sustainability Programming and interim Director of the Collaborative for the Earth. Reuben emerged as a candidate based on feedback from our C4E and climate research community. His appointment will be effective Monday, August 3, 2026.

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. 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.

Reuben, 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 for 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, he specializes in behavioral game theory, strategic responses to climate change, and experimental social science. He has published research across several fields, including in Nature Climate Change, Nature Human Behavior, 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, he has been active in climate and sustainability initiatives for both SBU and SUNY, including 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 is 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 SUNY Research Leadership Academy. He is eager to put the skills he developed there to good use in this new role.

Please join me in welcoming Reuben to these roles and thanking Kevin Reed 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. 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.

Sincerely,

Carl

Carl W. Lejuez

Executive Vice President and Provost