William Pizer, a top U.S. Treasury Department official, will teach at Duke next Fall having decided in March to leave the Obama Administration.
Pizer will join the faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy to carry out research on energy and environmental policy. In addition, he has been appointed as a faculty fellow in the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan institute that develops solutions to environmental challenges.
“Duke has a great group of people already working on environment and energy policy, a demonstrated commitment to be a leader in this area, and top-ranked programs to train undergraduates, master’s students and Ph.Ds,” Pizer said in a Duke news release. “I am excited to be joining such an active and vibrant faculty.”
Because of Pizer’s dual appointments, Sanford Dean Bruce Kuniholm and Nicholas Institute Director Tim Profeta, said they believe he will connect different disciplines at Duke while balancing between his two positions.
“In terms of involvement, the way we envision it, he’s roughly 50-50,” Profeta said. “Our hope, however, is that he doesn’t feel he has to clock hours with either institution. Rather, we hope he serves both the Institute and the School by acting as a bridge between us.”
Pizer’s extensive experience in government convinced Kuniholm to hire him. Pizer has served as the senior economist for environment and natural resources on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in addition to working with the Treasury Department. Pizer has also worked on the Clear Sky initiative and the Global Climate Change initiative, and was heavily involved in United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen and Cancun, Kuniholm said.
As deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy during the last two years, Pizer created and led a new office responsible for shaping the United States’ energy agenda and for outlining the Treasury Department’s role in the environment at home and abroad.
“He’s an environmental economist, and focuses primarily on designing and evaluating alternative policies and programs to mitigate climate change, so he’s a really excellent researcher in the field of public economics,” Kuniholm said.
Before his work in government, Pizer served as a senior fellow and research director at Resources For the Future, a nonpartisan think tank. His research during 12 years at RFF mostly concerned climate change and examined how the design of environmental policy affects program costs and efficiency. He has published more than 24 peer-reviewed articles. Pizer studied physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990, and earned his Ph.D. and master’s degree in economics at Harvard University in 1996. In addition, Pizer previously taught at Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University.
Duke’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research and the school’s initiatives to solve environmental issues have been instrumental in drawing top researchers like Pizer to the University, Kuniholm said.
“Duke has a major initiative in energy and the environment that’s being undertaken by six schools here,” he said. “This is going to be one of the major initiatives in the next few years that we are all working together in collaborating in across various schools. I think that was really attractive to a person like Pizer.”
Kuniholm added that Pizer’s personality made him attractive to the school as well.
“While he was involved in public policy, he did some teaching at Johns Hopkins, and we know there that people really prize the work that he did because he’s apparently a wonderful colleague, really generous with time, an excellent speaker, and so on,” Kuniholm said. “He’s just a really good colleague.”
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