I was at a stage in my career where I was questioning if I really wanted to remain just an academic. I knew I wanted to be working with undergrads, graduate students, and research,  but I also wanted to do things that are more tangible. To feel that I’m taking what I’ve studied and learned directly to the end users who really value it. It’s something I’ve been trying to move towards for the last 10 to 15 years of my career.

It was a complete game changer for me to learn about Cornell Atkinson and to hear the pitch for the center and its goals. To understand that the Atkinson family not only provided really valuable startup resources–which is amazing and phenomenal–but also a vision of how those resources were going to be leveraged to build connectivity with real impact and continued growth, but in thoughtful, well-articulated way. I thought, “Wow, I would love to be a part of that.”

Cornell not only had strong group of environmental and applied economists—it was really important for me to be in a department that was really strong on disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise–but on top of it, Cornell had this really impressive, highly-engaged, and energetic sustainability hub.  A place where I could help think about how to implement ideas, trial and error new methods, and join others to really think about how better integrate our research with the outside world. That was just super exciting. I also looked at some other schools, and while there were a couple of other places in play, none offered an opportunity like Cornell Atkinson.

We’re looking for folks who have developed their academic credibility but who now really want to have more impact by working with people who have connections to NGOs and businesses and governments. I suspect that there are a lot of academics out there who have tried the “here’s my great idea–take it” approach and discovered that that doesn’t often lead to impact.

We are looking for people ready to find new ways to engage with partners and stakeholders, both to transfer knowledge but also to bring their needs back to to Cornell and initiate new interdisciplinary efforts to address those needs. This two-way communication–developing program agendas with external partners—is not the norm in universities and is something we’re still very much learning to do.

These positions are for innovative people who want to stay firmly grounded in an academic environment with science and rigor but also want to work through a center which will help make multidisciplinary connections and partner with outside organizations.

This is for people who don’t want to keep doing the same stuff they’ve been doing. It’s for people who have the energy and ambition to do something which is very academic, but more.

My area is water quality. I’m an environmental economist who works on many areas of water quality, and I wanted to continue to do that Cornell–that was not negotiable for me.  I want to spend the rest of my career on this. It turned out that there wasn’t anybody at Cornell Atkinson yet who really wanted to champion those areas. Because I have many years of working on water quality issues,  I know a lot of people both in the economics community and also in federal agencies, like the EPA, National Academy of Sciences, USDA, and so on, and I bring that network of those connections with me.

When interviewed at Cornell, I knew what I would love to do:  I would love to build a community of scholars around the social costs of water pollution. Our intermediate-term goal is to quantify and monetize the costs associated with the pollution of water. Then we can take those numbers to help agencies, NGOs, and others think about how to allocate dollars for conservation programs and how to target their own resources for cleanup of water pollution.

I also knew I wanted to have my two colleagues—Dave Kaiser at the University of Massachusetts and Dan Phaneuf at the University of Wisconsin—to be full collaborators in this and to develop this program with me. Together, through the working group, we are building a community of scholars to identify the full interdisciplinary program needed to develop much more clear and complete metrics for the social cost of water pollution.

Through the working group, we are developing into the international leader for this community of practice. It’s a very interdisciplinary group: water quality modelers, ecologists, environmental and applied economists, agricultural engineers, and land use modelers. And although we started with a U.S.-centric focus, the concept applies internationally, and we’re now starting to talk with folks at the World Bank and elsewhere. The way we see this evolving is that there would be many studies in many areas, and part of our role is to be a bit of a clearing house. To organize the resources and be able to refer people to all the relevant available studies.

With part of the funding we received from Cornell Atkinson, we have held one workshop bringing together the community of scholars, and we’re planning our second full workshop. Last year we had about 70 people doing presentations, developing materials, and learning from one another. The next step is to get more of an infrastructure in place, with an online presence that can make available specific studies that can provide useful information to end users. We’re trying to very much do that in conjunction with our stakeholders. In water quality and other areas of sustainability, what we do matters. I really believe that through Cornell Atkinson I am making a little bit of impact.

50% of my time is dedicated to Cornell Atkinson and 50% is dedicated to the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. I only have of half the responsibilities of my peers at Dyson. I have half the teaching load, I have half the committees’ assignments, and they’ve been very good about that. Future hires should know that it’s customizable–there’s a loose framework within which you make a deal with the department partnering with Cornell Atkinson for the position.

At Cornell Atkinson, the faculty directors are expected to be intellectual leads. We don’t have specific responsibilities for administering programs: Our responsibilities are to be thought leaders at Cornell and to make connections across campus. It’s fluid. I lead of the social cost of water pollution working group, so I’m developing that program with Cornell Atkinson staff and engaging with external partners to build it up.