Charles Perrings is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, where he has been since 2005. Previous appointments include Professor of Environmental Economics and Environmental Management at the University of York; Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside; and Director of the Biodiversity Program of the Beijer Institute, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, where he is a Fellow.

Between 1995 and 2005 he was editor of the Cambridge University Press journal, Environment and Development Economics, and he remains on the editorial board of this and several other journals in environmental, resource and ecological economics, and in conservation ecology. He is Past President of the International Society for Ecological Economics, a society formed to bring together the insights of the ecological and economic sciences to aid understanding and management of environmental problems. He has advised various governmental, intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations as well as research funding agencies. In Britain he served on, inter alia, the Royal Society’s Environment Committee, the WHAT Commission on Crop Genetic Diversity in Agriculture and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (Natural Environment Research Council Research Institutes) Program Review Board. In the US he was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Working Group on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Recent research activities include two multi-year projects on the relationship between economic activity and the spread of human, animal and plant disease.  The first, funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of General Medical Sciences), focused on the role of economic decisions in the transmission of infectious disease. This was a collaboration between researchers at Arizona State University, the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of California Davis, The Ecohealth Alliance, Michigan State University, Brown University, Princeton University, The University of Wyoming, and Yale University.  The second focused on the human, animal and plant disease risks of trade. It was jointly funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.  It was a collaboration between the Arizona State University, the University of California Davis, The Ecohealth Alliance, Michigan State University, The University of Wyoming, Yale University, and the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the United States, plus the University of Sterling, the University of York and the Food and Environment Research Agency in the United Kingdom.