Dan McGrath Named BIE Executive Director
 |
Dan McGrath named new BIE Executive Director | |
Daniel T. McGrath, an environmental economist, has been named Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Dan’s role will be to supervise current BIE activities, coordinating and evaluating research, building relationships internally and externally, and importantly, fostering future research and outreach activities of the BIE. Dan says his primary goal is to build a stronger coalition among UC Berkeley’s faculty and students to advance scholarship on sustainability within BIE’s core themes: sustainable communities, environment and society, and energy and climate change. “BIE three core themes weave together the topics of climate change and sustainability. I believe that sustainable communities means building resilience to climate change at the local level. Environment and society means expanding our understanding of environmental values at regional scales and how these values are challenged by development and climate change. Energy and climate change means evolving a carbon-free society on a global scale. Advancing science and policy along these themes cannot be accomplished via a single academic discipline. UC Berkeley is uniquely positioned to build intellectual coalitions in research and teaching that forge together the current interdisciplinary structure of environment inquiry within higher education… to be the leader in building the new inter-discipline of sustainability.” Prior to joining BIE, Dan served as the Associate Director of the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he worked to advance interdisciplinary inquiry in the environment among scholars in urban planning, biology, earth science, civil engineering, philosophy, and public health. Dan’s experience also includes founding Salem Sound CoastWatch, which focuses on collaborative management of the Salem Sound estuary in Massachusetts. “My early encounters with natural-resource decision-makers were very influential on my intellectual direction, “ Dan says. “It became clear to me that at a local level, decision-makers were not able to place long-term ecosystems services at the table with competing alternatives. I believe that being able to do this by using credible financial measures of environmental value is the key to forging sustainable communities.” Today, Dan says, “Understanding our environment as natural capital is an idea that is gaining momentum and one that I believe will enable a more rapid operationalizing of sustainability concepts. The explosion of regional metropolitan economies and the impacts of climate change will ultimately mean extraordinary depletion of the natural capital stocks of California and the nation. UC Berkeley is one of the few places where developing a credible measure of rapid depletion the planet’s natural capital is possible, and I am very excited to be a part of it.” Dan holds an MBA in finance as well as two undergraduate degrees, one in mechanical engineering and one in history, from the University of Notre Dame. In 1996, Dan completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he focused on urban environmental policy. His dissertation, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation, was an analysis of how hazardous waste contamination risk impacts Chicago’s urban industrial land markets. This work was key to advancing the city of Chicago’s publicly-funded cleanups of contaminated brownfield sites. At UIC, Dan held adjunct appointments in the College of Urban Planning and in the Liautaud School of Business. In addition to administering BIE, Dan continues to pursue his own research. This work, funded by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, involves providing credible measures of social economic value by local government investment in natural capital.
Dan's home page: http://bie.berkeley.edu/mcgrath
|
||