Tracy Van Holt, Research Associate Professor

Tracy Van Holt is a Research Associate Professor at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. Her research focuses on identifying social-environmental connections to design equitable, sustainable, and profitable business strategies and examines how companies are working to solve sustainability and wellbeing challenges. Her goal is to change the way that companies consider the environment and workers in their business strategies through data-driven research that balances stakeholder needs. Tracy’s current research projects are focused on: restaurant and supply chain resiliency amid the COVID-19 pandemic, quality jobs and worker wellbeing, and sustainability and innovation.
Prior to NYU, Tracy was a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, Marine Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center, and an assistant professor in Geography at East Carolina University. She has taught research methods in text and spatial analysis for Cultural Anthropologists sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
Tracy has authored 19+ academic publications (see Google Scholar and ResearchGate profiles). She earned her Ph.D. from University of Florida where she was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar.
Tracy can be reached at tvanholt@stern.nyu.edu.
Notable Publications:
- The Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI): Monetizing Financial Benefits of Sustainability Actions in Companies (Sustainable Consumption and Production, November 2020; originally in Review of Business: Interdisciplinary Journal on Risk and Society, June 2019)
- Do Corporate Sustainability and Sustainable Finance Generate Better Financial Performance? A Review and Meta-Analysis (September 2020)
- Existence inductive theory building to study coordination failures in sustainable beef production (Journal of Cleaner Production, September 2020)
- The cultural consensus of sustainability driven innovation: Strategies for success (Business Strategy and the Environment, July 2020)
- Maintain or Disrupt: Narratives of Sustainability in Finance (Academy of Management, July 2020)
- Sustainable Purchasing Patterns and Consumer Responsiveness to Sustainability Marketing Messages (Hapres Journal of Sustainability Research, March 2020)
- The Evolution of Thought in the Era of Embedded Sustainability (Academy of Management, August 2019)
- Responsible Investing: Guide to ESG Data Providers and Relevant Trends (Journal of Environmental Investing, September 2017)