Charles Harvey is a biogeochemist and hydrologist and an experienced leader of international multidisciplinary field projects. In Bangladesh, he built a field program to study arsenic contamination of well water, a health crisis that continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people. On the island of Borneo, he built a program to study tropical peatlands, ecosystems that have historically been natural sinks of carbon but now emit enormous fluxes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. He is also credited with fundamental theoretical advances in chemical transport and reaction in groundwater.

Professor Harvey has a BA in mathematics from Oberlin College and an MS and PhD in Earth Science from Stanford University. He has worked as a hydrologist for the US Geological Survey, was a faculty member at Harvard University and is now a Professor of Environmental Engineering at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geologic Society of America and has received the M. King Hubbert Award for contributions to hydrogeology, the Abdulaziz International Prize for Water, and the Meinzer Award for advancing the science of hydrology.