Dr. Balk is Professor of Public Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, Professor in the Public Health, Economics, and Sociology Ph.D. Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Associate Director of the CUNY Institute of Demographic Research. She is also a 2016Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research is on urban demography in low- and middle-income countries. She combines demographic and spatial frameworks to examine urbanization and related demographic behaviors with respect to environmental factors, in particular climate change. She has several active research projects, funded by the NSF, AXA Research Fund, and NASA, with collaborators at the Population Council, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Jet Propulsion Lab. These projects examine Multi-Scale Processes Affecting Spatial Population Distributions; City Growth, Urbanization and Climate-Related Risks in the 21st Century; and demographic change and the built environment in mega cities of Asia. Using a spatial demographic lens, she also studies poverty, and demographic and health outcomes and change in developing countries.