Visiting Scholar Biographies
The Institute hosts environmental lawyers, practitioners, and scholars working on policy research projects aimed at domestic American environmental policy — national, regional or state — and at the international level and national level in other countries. Individual scholars are typically in residence at the Institute for periods of one to three months, with some staying for a year or more. The exchanges which take place under the auspices of the ELI Visiting Scholars Program help to strengthen institutions and stimulate intellectual activity across disciplines and borders. The program helps to build and sustain a growing network of environmental lawyers and related professionals dedicated to advancing environmental protection.
The Institute is pleased to introduce the current ELI Visiting Scholars. They are:
Barry Hill
Barry E. Hill is a scholar, teacher, public servant, and advocate for environmental justice. He has held senior level positions as a manager and an attorney in the public and private sectors. He is currently the Senior Counsel for Environmental Governance of the Office of International and Tribal Affairs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to assuming that position, he was the Director of the Agency's Office of Environmental Justice. Before moving to EPA, he was the Associate Solicitor, Division of Conservation and Wildlife, as well as the Director of the Office of Hearings and Appeals at the Department of the Interior. Before taking the Interior posts, he was Of Counsel at the law firm of Dickstein Shapiro, LLP where he practiced environmental law. Prior to joining the law firm, he was a Project Manager in the Superfund Business Unit of ICF International, an environmental consulting firm. Prior positions include Special Counsel to the Attorney General of the District of Columbia; Legal Counsel to the Inspector General of EPA; Law Secretary to the Deputy Administrative Judge of New York City, Criminal Division; and Assistant District Attorney of Kings County, Brooklyn.
He authored the law school textbook, "Environmental Justice: Legal Theory and Practice." And, he has authored/co-authored numerous articles on environmental law and policy, and environmental justice in scholarly and professional journals.
He has taught environmental justice and sustainable development at the Vermont Law School for more than 15 years, and political science at several universities.
In 2001, he was awarded the American Bar Association's "Award for Distinguished Achievement in Environmental Law and Policy" for his work, teaching, and research in the areas of environmental justice, and environmental law and policy.
He earned a B.A. degree in Political Science from Brooklyn College, and a M.A. degree in Political Science from Howard University. He received a J.D. from the Cornell University Law School.
Renee Martin-Nagle
Renee Martin-Nagle joined ELI as a Visiting Scholar in April 2011 after a 25-year career in aviation. From 1990 through January 2011 she served as Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary of Airbus Americas, where she managed all legal, compliance and environmental affairs, and from 1986 to 1990 she served as General Counsel of both Aerospatiale Helicopter Corporation (now American Eurocopter) and Aerospatiale General Aviation (SOCATA). During her career in aviation, Renee was active in industry and women's organizations, speaking frequently at conferences and serving on the boards of directors of Women in Aviation, the International Aviation Women's Association, the Aero Club of Washington and the American Bar Association Forum on Air and Space Law, which she also chaired from 2009 to 2011. The birth of her first grandson in April 2007 inspired her to dedicate the rest of her life to environmental causes, and that year she enrolled in the LL.M. program at George Washington University Law School, graduating in May 2010 with highest honors. Her thesis, which proposes that water in fossil aquifers be viewed as the common heritage of mankind, received the 2010 Jamie Grodsky Prize for Environmental Scholarship and was published by the Journal of Energy and Environmental Law. Currently Renee serves on the Council of Partners of ELI and on the boards of directors of the Chesapeake Legal Alliance and Omega Institute of Holistic Studies.
Mishkat Al Moumin
The former Minister of the Environment in the interim Iraqi government and recent Futrell Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute, Mishkat Al Moumin is a well-known Iraqi lawyer and a lecturer of human rights in University of Baghdad — College of Law. Since Iraq did not previously have a Ministry of Environment, Dr. Al Moumin designed its entire structure. In this post, she also developed a new environmental law, led campaigns to support Iraqi people living in environmentally dangerous areas, and initiated awareness-raising and cleaning projects. Prior to joining the government, she served as the women’s issues director for the Free Iraq Foundation, where she successfully advocated for women to hold 25 percent of the seats in the new Iraqi parliament. In this role, she also conducted trainings for NGOs and women leaders. In 2004, Dr. Al Moumin worked with the International Federation of Election System as an advisor on the elections in Iraq. As a practicing member of the Iraqi Bar Association, Dr. Al Moumin represented clients in cases concerning personal status and labor. Dr. Al Moumin was a lecturer at University of Baghdad College of Law, where she lectured on human rights, fundamental rights, international, and constitutional law. She has participated as a speaker and facilitator at several conferences on women’s issues in Iraq. She just graduated as a Mason fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where she earned a master’s degree in public administration, the course are related to environmental justice, gender, civil society, and human rights. She already has an MA and PhD in public international law from the University of Baghdad. Dr. Moumin has published articles on environmental developments and women’s roles in public life in various Arabic newspapers. She has also authored articles on international law and international justice in a number of legal journals. Finally she is the Founder and the Director of Women and Environment Origination that operates in Iraq, a member of the board of directors in PATH organization an international, nonprofit organization that creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions, enabling communities worldwide to break longstanding cycles of poor health. At ELI, Dr. Al Moumin collaborated with ELI staff in reviewing the water laws, regulations, and institutions governing water resources in the Middle East and North Africa. She also conducted research on Islamic water law and gender aspects of environmental management.
David Rejeski
David Rejeski directs the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a non-partisan policy research institute in Washington, DC. The program's mission is to explore the scientific and technological frontier, stimulating discovery and bringing new tools to bear on public policy challenges that emerge as science advances.
He was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Between 1994 and 2000, he served as an agency representative (from EPA) to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Before moving to CEQ, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) on a variety of technology and R&D issues, including the development and implementation of the National Environmental Technology Strategy. Prior to working at OSTP, he was head of the Future Studies Unit at the Environmental Protection Agency.
He is the co-editor of the book: Environmentalism and the Technologies of Tomorrow: Shaping the Next Industrial Revolution, and has authored numerous articles for ELI's Environmental Forum on topics ranging from electronic commerce to nanotechnology.
David sits on the advisory boards of a number of organizations, including the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education; the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the National Council of Advisors of the Center for the Study of the Presidency; the Journal of Industrial Ecology; and Games for Change. From 2004 to 2009, he was a member of EPA's Science Advisory Board. He has graduate degrees in public administration and environmental design from Harvard and Yale.
Bruce Rich
Bruce Rich is an attorney who has published extensively on the environment in developing countries and development in general. He is the author of a major critique and history of the World Bank (Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development, Beacon Press, 1994,1995) and was awarded the United Nations Global 500 Award for environmental achievement for his research and advocacy concerning international financial institutions. He worked for two and a half decades as an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, and has testified in numerous Congressional hearings on U.S. participation in international financial institutions. He has written numerous articles and opeds in publications such as The Nation, The Financial Times, The Ecologist, and The Environmental Forum, the policy journal of the Environmental Law Institute in Washington. His most recent book is "To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India," with a Forward by Amartya Sen and an Afterword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Beacon Press, April, 2010. His professional focus on finance and ethics, as well as numerous visits to South Asia, helped inspire the writing of To Uphold the World. His current professional interests include climate finance and addressing corruption in international lending. He is also working on a new book on the World Bank (to be published by Beacon Press in 2012) and the environment.
Rich is an honors graduate of Yale College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Kirk Talbott
Kirk Talbott is a Visiting Scholar at ELI working on the Post Conflict Peacebuilding and Natural Resources Management initiative. He comes to ELI after more than twenty-five years of experience in international law and development in Asia and Africa in particular. After graduating from Yale college, working in a steel mill for six months and traveling around the world for a year, Mr. Talbott embarked on a career linking law, international development and natural resources management. He earned his J.D. and M.S.F.S. from Georgetown University Law Center and the Foreign Service School. He first worked at the International Law Institute on training programs in contract negotiation for developing country officials and then briefly practiced international human rights law. Talbott then spent almost ten years at the World Resources Institute working with USAID, the World Bank, and many other organizations on African Environmental Action Plans, community based property rights in Asia and other collaborative policy initiatives. He later worked with conservation organizations on biodiversity programs in Asia before heading a humanitarian organization, First Voice International. It provided satellite radio services to millions of remote people. He has advised several governments and international organizations in resource management, good governance, and results monitoring and evaluation. Kirk has served on several non-profit boards and published and taught widely in the fields of environmental security, international law and development and human rights.
Tatiana R. Zaharchenko
Tatiana R. Zaharchenko is a Scholar in Residence at the Environmental Law Institute, currently spending a majority of her time in Europe. She has been a Senior Staff Attorney and an Advisor on the Eastern European Program at ELI in 1994-1995. Zaharchenko received her Ph.D. in Natural Resource Law and Environmental Protection from the All-Union Research Institute of Comparative Law in Moscow, Russia in 1988. For twelve years, she was a tenured law professor at the Ukrainian Law Academy in Kharkiv, Ukraine, teaching land and natural resources law and environmental protection. In addition, she served as a Counsel for the Ecological Commission of the city municipality. During perestroika, Dr. Zaharchenko was one of the first legal professionals introducing access to information, right to know, and public participation in environmental decision-making into the scholarly debate, legal writing, and law drafting. After an ABA/Soros Foundation professional internship in the USA in 1989, she provided course materials for her students on international and comparative environmental law. Since 1992, she has divided her time between the US and Europe, applying her comparative legal background enhanced by a LL.M. from the George Washington National Law Center to international projects reforming legal systems, laws and governance in the post-Soviet countries and Eastern Europe. Transparency and accountability in environmental governance remain the focus of her work. In 1994, while with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Zaharchenko wrote the Russian-language Citizen Guide for Environmental Democracy in Russia, the first such publication in the former Soviet region. In 1996-1999, as a senior program officer for the World Wildlife Fund, she directed a USAID-financed project to promote biodiversity conservation in Ukraine. The resulting dual language book, Priority-Setting in Conservation: A New Approach for Crimea, documented a broad participatory policy shaping process and it continues to guide conservation efforts for this region. In 2009, her paper, On the Way to Transparency: a Comparative Study on Post-Soviet States and the Aarhus Convention, was published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she was a scholar with the Kennan Institute. Zaharchenko has been assisting the European Commission, other multilateral and bilateral donors, and international non-governmental organizations in formulation, evaluation and implementation of environmental programs and projects. She served as a consultant to UNECE, UNEP, and the World Bank. She recently completed a long term assignment as the Project Team Leader of the European Union funded “Environmental Collaboration for the Black Sea: Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine.” Dr. Zaharchenko is the author of and/or contributor to over 50 publications and reports, and is a frequent speaker and invited guest lecturer internationally. She volunteers on boards of international environmental organizations and national NGOs.
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