Overview
Mark Borsuk’s research concerns the development and application of mathematical models for integrating scientific information on natural, technical, and social systems. He is a widely-cited expert in Bayesian network modeling with regular application to environmental and human health regulation and decision making. He is also the originator of novel approaches to climate change assessment, combining risk analysis, game theory, and agent-based modeling. Borsuk’s highly collaborative research has been funded by NSF, EPA, NIH, NIEHS and USFS, and he has authored or co-authored 75 peer-reviewed journal publications and 6 book chapters.
Borsuk received the Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award from the Society for Risk Analysis in 2013 and the Early Career Research Excellence Award from the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society in 2008. Before joining the Duke faculty, Dr. Borsuk was a member of the Dartmouth College faculty for 10 years where he held an appointment in the Thayer School of Engineering. Dr. Borsuk received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University, an M.S. in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University. He did his post-doctoral training in the Department of Systems Analysis, Integrated Assessment, and Modelling (SIAM) at the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology (EAWAG), where he advanced to head of the Decision Analysis and Integrated Assessment group.
As part of his appointment at Duke, Dr. Borsuk directs a new interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative in risk, uncertainty, optimization and decision-making.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
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Recent Publications
Local land-use decisions drive losses in river biological integrity to 2099: Using machine learning to disentangle interacting drivers of ecological change in policy forecasts
Journal Article Meteorological Applications · January 1, 2025 Climate and land-use/land-cover (LULC) change each threaten the health of rivers. Rising temperatures, changes in rainfall and runoff, and other perturbations, will all impact rivers' physical, biological, and chemical characteristics over the next century ... Full text CiteCausal inference to scope environmental impact assessment of renewable energy projects and test competing mental models of decarbonization
Journal Article Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability · December 1, 2024 Environmental impact assessment (EIA), life cycle analysis (LCA), and cost benefit analysis (CBA) embed crucial but subjective judgments over the extent of system boundaries and the range of impacts to consider as causally connected to an intervention, dec ... Full text CiteRemotely sensed above-ground storage tank dataset for object detection and infrastructure assessment.
Journal Article Scientific data · January 2024 Remotely sensed imagery has increased dramatically in quantity and public availability. However, automated, large-scale analysis of such imagery is hindered by a lack of the annotations necessary to train and test machine learning algorithms. In this study ... Full text CiteRecent Grants
Model-based Tracking and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services (MoTIVES) for Military Base Land-Use and Land-Management Decisions
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Strategic Environmental Research & Development Program · 2022 - 2027EAGER:PBI: Integrating Social and Economic Considerations in Ecosystem Innovation for Equitable Regional Transformation
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by East Carolina University · 2024 - 2026NSF2026: EAGER Identifying microbes' population-level environmental responses using Bayesian modeling
ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2020 - 2025View All Grants