Joel D. Scheraga
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Dr. Scheraga is the national program director for the Global Change Research Program and the Mercury Research Program in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development. Dr. Scheraga is responsible for managing a $20 million Global Change Research Program, a $4 million Mercury Research Program, and over 50 personnel in five laboratories and centers. He is also the EPA principal representative to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which coordinates and integrates scientific research supported by the U.S. government on climate and global change. He has published numerous articles on global climate change, environmental economics, public policy, the integration of science and policy in multidisciplinary programs, and applied microeconomics and microeconomic theory.
As a national program director at EPA, Dr. Scheraga directs policy-relevant assessments of the potential impacts of global climate change on air quality, water quality, aquatic ecosystems, and human health. These assessments are intended to provide timely and useful information to decision makers and resource managers, and include evaluation of adaptation options for responding to change. The global program also develops decision support tools to help resource managers cope with a changing climate. He directs a mercury program that studies the fate and transport of mercury in the environment, particularly in those areas where people harvest and eat fish that bioaccumulate the mercury.
Dr. Scheraga is actively involved in international research and assessment activities. He has participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and has been a member of several official U.S. Delegations to the international meetings of the IPCC. He was a coauthor of the 2005 Human Health Synthesis Report, which is part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He was a coeditor and lead author of the book, Climate Change and Human Health: Risks and Responses, released by the World Health Organization in December 2003, and coauthor of the 2003 WHO report, Methods of Assessing Human Vulnerability and Public Health Adaptation to Climate Change. He coauthored a white paper in 2003 on the effects of climate change on water quality in the Great Lakes Region for the US/Canada International Joint Commission's Water Quality Board.
Dr. Scheraga received an A.B. degree in geology/mathematics/physics from Brown University in 1976, an M.A. in economics from Brown University in 1979, and a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University in 1981.