Alan D. Thornhill, Ph.D.
Chief Environmental Officer, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior
Dr. Alan D. Thornhill is the Chief Environmental Officer of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior, as of 20 November 2011. In March 2010, he was appointed to the position of Science Advisor to the Director of BOEM. From 2001 to 2010, he was the Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology—an international society of 12,000 conservation professionals working to advance the science and practice of protecting life on Earth. Previously he was the Director of Learning and Communications for the Science Division for The Nature Conservancy (the global organization), and faculty in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In his role as the first Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology, he launched the executive office, managed the development of a professional staff, and initiated programs that resulted in a tripling of the global membership in seven years. Among these programs is the prestigious David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship Program—a two year postdoctoral research grant for outstanding early-career scientists working in conservation. For more than 15 years, Dr. Thornhill has worked in conservation at the nexus between academic research and application of science to conservation and policy. For over a decade, Thornhill has focused his attention on climate change adaptation science and this topic area is a significant part of his portfolio at the Department of the Interior where he is the Department’s Principle representative to the US Global Change Research Program and is engaged with a number of climate change working groups. Since 2004 he has been part-time faculty in the College of Natural Resources, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where he teaches applied conservation courses focusing on human and green infrastructure and how the two can be leveraged in service to sustainability. He earned his Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees in Ecology from the University of California, Irvine.
