Fracking Biographies

Mark K. Boling is President of V+ Development Solutions, a division of Southwestern Energy Company. The mission of V+ Development Solutions is to identify, develop and implement solutions to the challenges of unconventional resource development that strike an appropriate balance among the environmental, social and economic impacts of the Company’s activities. Prior to joining Southwestern in January of 2002, he was in private practice in Houston, Texas, specializing in oil and gas transactional work. Mr. Boling was a partner with the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.

Travis Bradford is the president and founder of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization focused on harnessing the power of the business sector to develop cost-effective and sustainable solutions in technologies, including energy, water, food, and recycling. Through the Institute, he helped launch Greentech Media and the Carbon War Room. He currently teaches full-time at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia Business School, and in the Earth Institute's Masters in Sustainability Management.

Mark Brownstein is Associate Vice President & Chief Counsel of the US Climate & Energy Program at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and leads EDF’s natural gas efforts.  Additionally, Mark is an Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and a Governance Committee member of The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL).  Mark also specializes in utility-related issues, including transmission development, wholesale and retail electric market design, rate reform, and power plant siting and investment.

Michael Burger is an Associate Professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. His scholarship on environmental federalism has thus far addressed emerging regulatory responses to hydraulic fracturing, offshore wind and local climate change initiatives. Recently, he represented a coalition of local government association as amici in the Supreme Court case (italics) American Trucking Associations v. City of Los Angeles.

Timothy Fitzgerald is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Economics at Montana State University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. His research interests include energy, environmental, and natural resource economics. Fitzgerald is the 2012-13 John V. Krutilla Fellow at Resources for the Future.

Dave Freudenthal, a Wyoming native, served two terms as Wyoming’s 31st governor. In 2002, Freudenthal, a Democrat and first-time candidate, won an upset victory in one of America’s most overwhelmingly Republican states. When he stepped down in 2011, his approval rating was over eighty percent—at the top among all U.S. governors—and he left his successor with a balanced budget and a billion dollar surplus. Approximately twelve percent of all energy consumed in America originates in Wyoming.

Michael B. Gerrard is Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on environmental and energy law and directs the Center for Climate Change Law. He is also Associate Chair of the Faculty of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Before joining the Columbia faculty in January 2009, he was partner in charge of the 110-lawyer New York office of Arnold & Porter LLP; he is now Senior Counsel to the firm.

Deborah Goldberg is the Managing Attorney of Earthjustice’s northeast regional office, located in New York City. Earthjustice, the nation’s largest non-profit environmental law firm, is dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. Since her arrival at Earthjustice in July 2008, Ms. Goldberg has been working to protect public health and the environment from the adverse effects of gas development in the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions.

Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is noted for contributions to economic theory and resource and environmental economics. He holds bachelors (first class), masters and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University, where he studied at Churchill College and taught at Christ’s College. He has also taught at Sussex, Essex, Yale, Stanford, École Polytechnique, Stockholm and Princeton. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Universite´ de Paris Dauphine.

Christopher S. Kulander teaches oil and gas law, property and mining law at the Texas Tech School of Law. He is also Of Counsel to Haynes and Boone, LLP. He joined the faculty in the summer of 2011 and is admitted to practice in Texas and New Mexico. He received his J.D. from the University of Oklahoma, where he was managing editor for the Oklahoma Bar Mineral Law Newsletter, note editor and assisting managing editor for the American Indian Law Review, and research assistant for Owen L. Anderson, Eugene Kuntz Chair of Oil and Gas Law.

Michael A. Levi is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Director of the CFR Program on Energy Security and Climate Change. An expert on climate change, energy security, arms control and nuclear terrorism, Michael is the author of The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future (Oxford University Press), published in 2013.

Thomas W. Merrill is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches property, torts, and administrative law. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and Yale Law School. He has undergraduate degrees from Grinnell College and Oxford University and a law degree from the University of Chicago. He clerked on the D.C. Circuit (for Chief Judge David Bazelon) and the U.S. Supreme Court (for Justice Harry Blackmun) and served as Deputy Solicitor General (from 1987 to 1990).

David M. Schizer served as a dean of the Law School from 2004 to 2014 and is one of the nation’s leading tax scholars. His research also focuses on nonprofits, energy law, and corporate governance.

Charles B. (Chuck) Stanley is Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of QEP Resources, Inc., a leading independent natural gas and oil exploration and production company. QEP operations are focused in the Rocky Mountain and Midcontinent regions of the United States. The company also gathers, compresses, treats, and processes natural gas.

Hannah Wiseman, an Assistant Professor at the Florida State University College of Law, received an A.B. from Dartmouth College (summa cum laude) and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Professor Wiseman researches governance challenges at the intersection of land use, energy, and environmental law, and she has explored these issues in the shale gas context since 2008, when she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Texas School of Law.