The Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth is excited to welcome Professor Conor Carney as a Senior Instructional Professor appointed in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. Carney will lead the Institute’s undergraduate education programs, including the groundbreaking new major and minor based on the Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth. The undergraduate program is now open for enrollment, with the first classes beginning in the fall 2025.
“We designed the Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth to reshape undergraduate, graduate, and societal understanding about this defining challenge,” says Institute Director Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. “Besides providing an interdisciplinary understanding of the challenge, it is based on the University of Chicago’s liberal arts tradition that’s ultimate aim is to provide students with the tools to learn how to learn. We were thrilled to find a fellow traveler in Professor Carney and bring him to the University of Chicago to lead the undergraduate program. He is a leading expert on the climate and growth challenge and a star teacher—we couldn’t be more pleased to have him as a colleague.”
The major and minor programs are the first degree programs based on the Institute’s Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth, with the second program—a one-year Master of Science in Climate and Energy Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy—welcoming its first cohort in Summer 2026. Using a 360-degree approach, the Chicago Curriculum provides students with a foundational grounding of the climate and growth challenge and experiential learning to widen their perspectives of the challenge.
“The idea is that the scientist or the engineer or the economist will go out into the world and not just have a very strong and specific understanding of their field but will have a deeper understanding of how their work fits into the bigger picture in a way that allows them to make better decisions. And for those who go into entirely different fields, they will enter them with a sharpened mind based on the unique interdisciplinary training,” says David Weisbach, co-director of the Chicago Curriculum on Climate and Sustainable Growth and the Walter J. Blum Professor of Law. “I look forward to working with Conor to help shape future generations to think about these challenges in new and cross-cutting ways.”
The Chicago Curriculum also serves as the foundation for a wide range of co-curricular programs housed at the Institute, which Carney will oversee. These programs complement the classroom learning by exposing University of Chicago students to real-world experiences, training and mentorship. Many of these programs are supported by the Polsky Energy Transition Leadership Academy, which fosters opportunities to engage with a network of policymakers, innovators and industry leaders through events, treks and energy summits.
“Returning to Chicago and joining the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth feels like a homecoming, not just to a city that means so much to me, but to the core questions that inspire my research and teaching,” says Carney. “I look forward to working closely with students, both in the classroom and through advising and co-curricular programs, as we explore new ways of understanding and addressing the climate-growth tradeoff.”
Carney has a rare combination of experience in both academia and the “real world”— being both an exceptional teacher and researcher as well as a consultant who has worked through the day-to-day challenges of the industry. Originally from Chicago, Carney is moving from Massachusetts. There, he taught microeconomic theory and environmental economics at the College of the Holy Cross, where he also received his B.A. in economics.
Following graduation, Carney worked for Chicago Partners LLC as an economic consultant providing support on projects related to antitrust, accounting, intellectual property, international trade and investment, labor, technical finance, securities, and valuation. In 2010, he returned to academia and completed an M.S. in economics from Tufts University followed by an M.A. and PhD in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017. After completing his PhD, Carney worked as an associate at the Brattle Group, where he focused on projects related to environmental damages and competition before shifting to academia. The majority of his research is at the intersection of environmental, agriculture, labor, climate change, and development economics.