Frank Biermann is a professor of political science and environmental policy sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He specialises in global environmental governance, with emphasis on climate negotiations, UN reform, global adaptation governance, public-private governance mechanisms, the role of science, North-South relations, and trade and environmental conflicts.

Biermann holds a number of research management positions, including head of the Department of Environmental Policy Analysis at the Vrije Universiteit and general director of the Netherlands Research School for the Socio-economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE), a national research network of nine research institutes with 150 scientists and 350 PhD students. Biermann is also the founding chair of the annual series of Berlin Conferences on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change; the founding director of the Global Governance Project (glogov.org), a joint programme of twelve European research institutes; and the chair of the Earth System Governance Project, a ten-year global research programme under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (earthsystemgovernance.org).

His most recent publications are Managers of Global Change: The Influence of International Environmental Bureaucracies (ed. with B. Siebenhüner, MIT Press, 2009); Global Climate Governance Beyond 2012: Architecture, Agency and Adaptation (ed. with P. Pattberg and F. Zelli, Cambridge UP, 2010); and International Organizations in Global Environmental Governance (ed. with B. Siebenhüner and A. Schreyögg, Routledge 2009).