Information on each speaker will be added as their bios arrive in the PERC office. Check back here for updated information and review the agenda periodically for the precise title each speaker has chosen for his or her presentation.

Terry Anderson
Executive Director of PERC
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Professor Emeritus at Montana State University

Anderson's work helped launch the idea of free market environmentalism. He is the author or editor of 30 books. He has published widely in both professional journals and the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and Fly Fisherman. Anderson received his B.S. from the University of Montana in 1968 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington in 1972, after which he began his teaching career at Montana State University where he won several teaching awards. Anderson is an avid outdoorsman and a skilled bow hunter.

Nigel Asquith
Director of Science
Fundacion Natura Bolivia

Asquith is executive director of the EcoFund Foundation, a $17 million conservation fund set up by the oil company shareholders of the Ecuadorian Heavy Crude Pipeline. he is also the cofounder and director of science at the Fundacion Natura Bolivia in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. From 2001 to 2005, he worked for Conservation International(CI) where he developed a regional strategy for CI in northern Mesoamerica. Asquith holds a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Duke University and has over 15 years experience designing and implementing conservation projects.

Rosalind Bark-Hodgins is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Arizona. Two of her postdoctoral research projects are funded by the Bureau of Reclamation. The first is a multi-PI project to integrate predictive climate science directly into the river system model used for management and planning in the Colorado River Basin. Improved hydrologic predictive capacity could provide water managers with new and earlier management windows to implement operational changes or to adopt cost-effective shortage adaptation strategies to enhance dry-year water supply reliability, such as dry-year irrigation forbearance. A second project evaluates the structure and efficiency of dry-year irrigation forbearance programs in the western US designed to improve dry year supply reliability for both metropolitan uses and instream flows. A final project examines the innovative features of the Arizona Water Settlements Act, 2004 that may improve water supply reliability in the state, such as water leases, exchanges, banking, and firming. Rosalind is a New Zealander but grew up in Hong Kong. She attended the University of Oxford on a scholarship. After attaining her B.A. (Hons) in Politics, Philosophy and Economics she worked as a consultant before completing her M.Sc. in Environmental Economics and Resource Management at the University College London, London University. She moved to the US with her husband and decided to complete a Ph.D. with a focus on semi-arid water issues, in the small but well-respected Arid Lands Resource Sciences program at the University of Arizona. Her minor was in Agricultural and Resource Economics the home department of her advisor, Professor Bonnie Colby.

Alex Echols
Director of Pioneering Solutions
Sand County Foundation

Alex Echols grew up on the family's farm (known as the New Farm by the family in 1780) in Virginia. He got most of his education at the College of Hard Knocks and a formal education, including a bachelor's degree in Philosophy in Environmental Science at Miami University and Master's degree in Urban Planning at Texas A&M. Echols came to Washington DC to work on conservation issues. He worked for Senator Robert W. Kasten, Jr. (R-WI) for 12 years where he wrote key conservation programs like the Conservation Title of the Farm Bill and an extensive rewrite of our bilateral and multilateral foreign aid programs. Subsequently, Echols worked for a trade association where he used market incentives to encourage the use of recyclables and then spent 6 years at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The first 4.5 as Deputy Director and the last year and a half as Acting Executive Director. In 2001, Echols set up his own consulting firm to help industry, landowners, the conservation community and government deliver more conservation for their dollar invested. He was particularly interested in non-regulatory approaches to better environmental management, getting a better return on conservation investment, use of incentives and markets to improve conservation delivery and fostering broader participation in conservation. Echols's clients are the Sand County Foundation where he has developed a market-based approach to reducing non-point source pollution from agriculture, and the Philanthropy Roundtable where he is the director of a program designed to recruit new donors to conservation and broaden the tools used to enhance the quality of our environment.

Noah Hall
Professor
Wayne State University Law School
University of Michigan Law School

Noah Hall's teaching and expertise is in environmental and water law, and his research focuses on issues of environmental governance, federalism, and transboundary pollution and resource management. Much of his work focuses on the Great Lakes, the world's most significant freshwater resource. He is the author of a widely-cited article on Great Lakes water law, Toward A New Horizontal Federalism: Interstate Water Management in the Great Lakes Region (Colorado Law Review 77: 405 (2006)). His work has been published in many journals, including the Harvard Environmental Law Review and the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. Before entering academia, Hall was an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation, where he managed the Great Lakes Water Resources Program. He was deeply involved in negotiating and drafting the proposed Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement .Hall graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, concentrating in environmental policy.

Kathy Jacobs
Executive Director
Arizona Water Institute

Kathy Jacobs is the Executive Director of the Arizona Water Institute, a consortium of the three Arizona universities focused on water-related research, education and technology transfer focused on water supply sustainability. She is also the Deputy Director of a NSF Center for Sustainability of Arid Region Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHRA), and a professor in the University of Arizona Soil, Water and Environmental Science Department. She has more than twenty years of experience as a water manager for the state of Arizona, including 14 years as the director of the Tucson Active Management Area. Her research interests include groundwater management, water policy, connecting science and decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and use of climate change and climate variability information for water management applications. She has served on five National Academy panels and wrote the water sector chapter for the US National Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Change.

L.D. McMullen
CEO and General Manager
Des Moines Water Works

L.D. McMullen has been CEO and General Manager of Des Moines Water Works since 1986. He joined the Des Moines Water Works in 1978, serving as Design Engineer and Director of Engineering Services before being appointed Assistant General Manager and Acting General Manager in 1985. McMullen has expertly guided the city's water resources through times of both calm and crisis. His skills have earned him standing as a national leader in the arena of water resource management. He has two terms as Chair of the National Drinking Water Advisory Council, has published numerous professional papers, and is a national speaker on the issues of water quality. He was a key developer of the Partnership for Safe Water, an initiative that the Environmental Protection Agency and large water utilities have adopted, and he now is working with planners and engineers in Cherkassy, Ukraine, to help that community solve its water-quality challenges. Prior to joining the Water Works, McMullen was a professor at the University of Iowa, served as Sanitary Engineer for the U.S. Public Health Service and as Water Plant Operator for the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Gretchen Rupp
Montana Water Center
101 Huffman Building
Bozeman, MT 59717-2690
(406) 994-6690
grupp@montana.edu

Gretchen Rupp has served as Director of the Montana University System Water Center since 2000. The Center is one of 54 university-based research, education and outreach institutions created by Congress in 1964. Housed at Montana State University, it operates fisheries and aquatic ecology research programs, an aquatic science laboratory, and continuing-education programs for water professionals, as well as outreach programs for landowners and students. Gretchen has degrees in biology and environmental engineering. Before joining the Water Center, she spent a short period as a marine biologist, a number of years in environmental consulting and several years as the Extension Environmental Engineer for Montana. Gretchen's chief professional focus in recent years has been water quality and treatment. She is a licensed professional engineer who has conducted and directed research, taught engineering, organized professional conferences and run water outreach programs for audiences of all types. She is immediate Past President of the National Institutes for Water Resources, a former board member of the Universities Council on Water Resources, and a Natural Resources Board member of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. She is keenly interested in how best to muster the resources of the Nation's universities to formulate and address a coherent water research agenda for the 21st century.

Brandon Scarborough
Research Fellow
PERC

Brandon Scarborough is a research fellow at PERC currently focused on the use of water markets in the West to restore stream flows for wildlife, fish and other environmental amenities. He has completed another project on carbon sequestration and the efficacy of using forest management to address climate change, which has received national media attention. His other interests include the interactions between natural resources and institutional quality, climate change, and how economic prosperity affects individuals' demands for environmental quality. Brandon is a native of North Carolina where he earned bachelor's degrees in business and biology at Appalachian State University. He also holds a master's degree in applied economics from Montana State University. He lives in Bozeman where he enjoys hiking, biking, skiing, and all of the surrounding mountains, preferably with snow on them.

Reagan Waskom
Director
Colorado Water Resources Research Institute
Colorado State University

Reagan Waskom currently serves as the Director of the Colorado Water Resources Research Institute and as Director of the Colorado State University Water Center. Dr. Waskom is a member of the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences faculty with a joint appointment to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CSU. In addition, Reagan currently serves as the national chair and is a Regional Director for the USDA-CSREES Integrated Water Program. Dr. Waskom has worked on various water related research, education and outreach programs in Colorado for the past 20.

James G. Workman
Natural Resources Consultant
CONFLUENCE

James Workman, a Yale and Oxford honors graduate, spent years as an award-winning political and business reporter in Washington, DC before being recruited as a Special Assistant to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. He focused U.S. communications, policy papers and speeches on wildland fire, endangered species, climate change and what became his strongest passion: dam removal. Moving to Africa in 2000, Workman helped a small team forge the landmark Report of the World Commission on Dams, and he has written and lectured widely on both dam construction and dam destruction. Clients of his water resources consultancy, Confluence, range from Nelson Mandela to Bechtel, IUCN to Coca-Cola, USAID to Natural Heritage Institute. He has advised governments of China how to reinvest hydropower revenues in floodplains and of India how to apply cap-and-trade policies to reduce groundwater over-pumping. For two years he lived out of a Land Rover in southern Africa writing about the causes and consequences of water scarcity and tracking the desert siege between Botswana and the last free Kalahari Bushmen. Next year Bloomsbury/Walker Press will publish his forthcoming book: Heart of Dryness. Workman lives with his wife Vanessa and their daughter Camille in San Francisco

Bruce Yandle
Dean
Clemson University