SCHOLARS & STAFF

Daniel Vermeer (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2002) is the Executive Director of the Corporate Sustainability Initiative (CSI). Dan comes to Duke from The Coca-Cola Company, where he was Director of Sustainable Value Chain, an enterprise-wide initiative to integrate sustainability into Coca-Cola's core business practices, including business planning, procurement, employee engagement, customer relationships, communications, and brand positioning. Prior to that, Dan founded and led Coca-Cola's Community Water Partnerships program, resulting in 125 public-private water sustainability projects in fifty countries. Dan also designed an industry "gold standard" Environmental Assessment Methodology, identifying risks and priorities across over 800 manufacturing facilities in 200 countries. He is the founder and chief architect of the Global Water Challenge, a multi-partner organization for innovative water and sanitation initiatives, co-author of the CEO Water Mandate (signed by several Fortune 500 companies), and lead contributor to several policy documents issued through the World Economic Forum, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Foundation.  Dan's recent work at Coca-Cola has pursued sustainability issues and opportunities in the value chain, focusing on both upstream ingredient and material suppliers, as well as downstream retailer and consumer opportunities

Robert T. Clemen (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1984), Professor of Decision Sciences at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, is the Fuqua School Faculty Director of CSI. He has broad interests in the use of decision analysis for organizational decision making, and special interests in the psychology of judgment, assessing expert probabilities, the effectiveness of decision-making techniques, and using decision analysis to help organizations become environmentally sustainable. The author of the widely used text Making Hard Decisions, Professor Clemen is also the founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Decision Analysis. He has published over forty scholarly articles that have appeared in such journals as Management Science, Operations Research, International Journal of Forecasting, Decision Analysis, and others. Professor Clemen’s consulting and executive teaching include work for corporations, utilities, and government agencies, and have covered such diverse areas as salmon farming, offshore oil leasing, avalanche prediction, nuclear waste storage, and environmental policy.

Deborah Rigling Gallagher, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of Environment, is CSI’s Nicholas School Director. She is also Executive Director of the Duke Environmental Leadership program. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a masters degree in Public Policy from Harvard University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University. Dr. Gallagher’s research focuses on public policies related to the interaction of business and the environment. Her work has examined public-private partnerships for brownfields redevelopment, stakeholder influences on business sustainability behavior, design of environmental management systems and the professionalization of sustainability within firms. Prior to her academic career, Dr. Gallagher held leadership positions in the public and private sector, most recently as a director of environment, health and safety for Kraft Foods

Katie Kross is Associate Director of Business & Environment Education with Duke University's Corporate Sustainability Initiative. In this role, she manages all of the student-facing programs of the Corporate Sustainability Initiative and serves to connect graduate and undergraduate students with courses, project opportunities, internships, events, and other resources related to corporate sustainability. Katie has 11 years of experience as a sustainability practitioner, career coach, and university administrator, most recently as the Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. She has advised on sustainability strategy, business planning, and market research projects for a number of organizations in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, and has written a forthcoming book on MBA careers in the sustainability field (for publication in Fall 2009). She has also served on the boards of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development and the Triangle, North Carolina professional chapter of Net Impact. She holds a BA from Davidson College and an MBA from UNC.

Duke Affiliated Faculty:

External Faculty Affiliates:

Corporate Sustainability Initiative | Box 90658 | Duke University | Durham, NC 27708 | 919.681.7182 | fax: 919.681.7176 | csi@nicholas.duke.edu