Speaker Bios 2023

Eli Fenichel
Dr. Eli Fenichelis the Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Yale University. His research connects economics, epidemiology, natural science, and sustainable development, with a focus on intertemporal allocation and tradeoffs. Prof. Fenichel approaches natural resources as capital assets, and views natural resource management problems as investment decisions. He believes that framing resource management problems as investment decisions creates opportunities for creative 21st century natural resource management and policy. A central part of Prof. Fenichel’s research focuses on measuring the value of natural capital under prevailing institutions.

Mary Bohman
Dr. Mary Bohman retired in 2023 after holding senior leadership positions in the U.S. federal statistical and research system at the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. She served as Acting Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring on-time delivery of BEA’s statistics while overseeing the development of new statistics, including rapid data to help understand the effects of the pandemic and recovery programs. Previously, Mary was Administrator of USDA’s Economic Research Service. She provided leadership for international initiatives to improve agricultural and rural statistics through the UN Statistical Commission and worked to build partnerships among agricultural economics research organizations.

J. Wesley Burnett
Dr. J. Wesley Burnett is a research economist with interests in natural resource, conservation, agri-environmental, and energy economics. Prior to joining the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) in 2020, he served for ten years in higher education. Burnett is the natural capital accounting technical lead within the ERS and co-coordinator for all USDA efforts.

Corbett Grainger
Dr. Corbett Grainger is an Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he has been on faculty since 2010. He is also Co-Editor at Land Economics, a faculty affiliate at the Center for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at UiB in Bergen, Norway and a Fellow at CESifo. His research studies the effects of environmental and resource policies on different stakeholders and households; the political economy of environmental policies; and distributional impacts of market-based environmental and natural resource policies. When he’s not working, Grainger enjoys visiting new places, trying new foods, and exploring the outdoors year-round.

Bonnie Keeler
Dr. Bonnie Keeler is an associate professor and Charles M. Denny Chair of environmental policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Keeler’s research evaluates the equity implications of environmental policies at state and regional levels, with a focus on water resources science and management. Keeler co-directs the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the University of Minnesota and serves as a subcommittee member of the Environmental Protection Agencies Board of Scientific Counselors. Keeler directs the Beyond the Academy Network – a coalition of academic leaders seeking to reform university structures to promote more action-oriented engaged scholarship on sustainability. Keeler also leads a new $10 million dollar technical assistance center designed to help rural, remote, and disadvantaged communities across EPA Region 5 access federal energy and environmental funding.