Who We Are!
Charles A. S. Hall
Chair of the Board of Directors
Charles Hall is a systems ecologist who received his PhD under Howard T. Odum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Hall is the author or editor of seven books and more than 250 scholarly articles. He is best known for his development of the concept of EROI, or energy return on energy investment, which is an examination of how organisms, including humans, invest energy in obtaining additional energy to improve biotic or social fitness. He has applied these approaches to fish migrations, carbon balance, tropical land use change, and the extraction of petroleum and other fuels in both natural and human-dominated ecosystems. He is developing a new field, biophysical economics, as a supplement or alternative to conventional Neo-Classical economics, while applying systems and EROI thinking to a broad series of resource and economic issues.
Jessica Lambert
President and CEO
Jessica G. Lambert is President and CEO of ISBPE. She also serves as Co-Chair and CIO of Next Generation Energy Initiative, Inc. (NGEI). Ms. Lambert's work focuses on resource availability trends and their effect on societal well-being. She is an active member of the Biophysical Economics community. From 2010 to 2012 Ms. Lambert was a Research Associate at the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca, NY where she performed and managed National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research on the anthropogenic effects observed in ecosystems affected by the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill. Prior to her appointment at NGEI, Ms. Lambert served as an intern for the White House Council on Environmental Quality's (CEQ) Land and Water team and as a White House Intern for the Office of Energy and Climate Change.
Kent Klitgaard
Vice President
Kent Klitgaard is professor of economics and the Patti McGill Peterson Professor of Social Sciences at Wells College in Aurora, New York, where he has taught since 1991. Kent received his Bachelor’s degree at San Diego State University and his Masters and PhD at the University of New Hampshire. At Wells, he teaches a diverse array of courses including the History of Economic Thought, Political Economy, Ecological Economics, The Economics of Energy, Technology and the Labor Process, and Microeconomic Theory, and is a cofounder of the Environmental Studies Program. Kent is active in the International Society for Ecological Economics and is a founding member of the International Society for BioPhysical Economics. Recently, his interests have turned towards the degrowth movement, and he has published multiple papers in Research and Degrowth. He has two children, and is interested in the outdoors in general: from hiking to beach walking to the occasional round of golf (despite the high energy use of golf courses). Kent is a Californian who still surfs the frigid waters of New England when he gets a chance.
John Schramski
Treasurer