Benjamin Wilde

Ben Wilde is the Program and Research Manager for the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities (the center). In this capacity, Wilde manages the center’s initiatives, including developing scopes of work, planning and managing resources, setting milestones and deadlines, developing systems of monitoring and evaluation, and managing the relationship with strategic partners. He also contributes to center-led research, including proposal development, literature reviews, data collection, analysis, and dissemination of the findings in the form of articles, working papers, and communication outputs.

Before joining the center, Wilde spent ten years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), working as a laboratory technician, doctoral candidate, and finally postdoctoral researcher. During this time, he managed an interdisciplinary team of researchers, private sector representatives, and community stakeholders in four different city-regions across Sub-Saharan Africa (Arba Minch, Ethiopia, Kamonyi, Rwanda, Bukavu, DRC, and Msunduzi, South Africa) with the aim of restructuring urban waste streams to support sustainable and equitable economic development.

Prior to pursuing his doctoral work, Wilde served in the Peace Corps, where he supported environmental education and water resource projects in Bolivia. He then obtained a master’s degree in community and regional planning from the University of New Mexico. As a broadly educated researcher, Wilde has an appreciation for the complexities inherent in human-environment systems. He is interested in applied, transdisciplinary, and solutions-oriented research that endeavors to support sustainable and equitable community development.