Yale's Environment School Strengthens Faculty with Major Additions

As part of its ongoing faculty development plan, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. announced today the addition of four faculty members.

The four new assistant professors will add depth to environmental and energy economics, industrial environmental management and ecosystem ecology. They bring to 14 the number of faculty recruited to the school in the past two years.

The new regular faculty include: Sheila Cavanagh, assistant professor of environmental and natural resource economics; Marian Chertow, assistant professor of industrial environmental management; Erin Mansur, jointly appointed with the Yale School of Management as an assistant professor of energy and environmental economics, and Peter Raymond, assistant professor of ecosystem ecology.

“We are very pleased that these extremely promising scholars will be joining our expanding program,” said Dean James Gustave Speth. “They are committed to outstanding scholarship, but also have the commitment to practical environmental management that we seek.”

Cavanagh, a doctoral candidate in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, received a master’s degree in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree with high distinction in political and social thought from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation research focuses on the effectiveness of various policy instruments in managing urban water scarcity.

She has worked in research capacities at the Texas Water Development Board, Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, Center for Environmental Resource Management in Latin America at the University of Texas, and the National Policy Association in Washington, D.C.

Mansur is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has conducted research in various applied fields while working at the University of California Energy Institute, Goldman School of Public Policy, and Resources for the Future. His job market paper, “Environmental Regulation in Oligopoly Markets: A Study of Electricity Restructuring,” examines the environmental welfare implications of firms exercising market power in the recently deregulated Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland electricity market. His other research has focused on the magnitude of wealth transfers resulting from the exercise of market power in the market, and the response of San Diego customers to retail electricity price shocks.

Raymond is a post-doctoral scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from the College of William & Mary and a bachelor’s degree in environmental chemistry from Marist College.

His research interests include inorganic carbon cycling and air-sea exchange, isotope geochemistry of riverine, estuarine, and oceanic organic matter, and organic carbon cycling in marshes, rivers, estuaries, and oceans.

Chertow, who recently completed her Ph.D. at the school, has been director of the Industrial Environmental Management Program since 1991. Her teaching and research focuses on industrial ecology, environmental technology innovation, and business/environment issues. Current research interests are the application of innovation theory to the development of environmental and energy technology and the study of industrial symbiosis geographically-based exchanges of wastes, materials, energy and water within networks of businesses.

She co-edited the 1997 book, “Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy,” with Daniel Esty, associate professor of environmental law and policy at F&ES. The book, published by Yale University Press, is in its second printing.

Chertow joined Yale after 10 years in state and local government and environmental business. She previously served as president of the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, a statewide bonding agency where she oversaw the development and construction of environmental infrastructure projects.