Faculty & Speakers
The Prince of Wales's Business & the Environment Programme
Faculty Director
Michael Watts is currently Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for over twenty-five years. His current research and writing addresses the natural and social history of oil in Nigeria entitled Black Gold: Oil, Nation and Violence in Nigeria. He has also conducted research in Senegambia, Kerala (India), Vietnam and California on a number of issues pertaining to agrarian change, political Islam, agro-food systems, and political ecology. He has also established the Berkeley Working group on Environmental Politics, the major centre for cross-disciplinary political ecological research on the Berkeley campus. The author of 8 books and over 100 articles, Watts has served as the advisor to over 50 PhD dissertations (as Chair) and over 60 as second reader. He has received a number of awards and fellowships from scholarly organizations including the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was educated at University College London and the University of Michigan and has held visiting appointments at the Smithsonian Institution, Bergen, Bologna, and London. Watts has served as a consultant to UNDP, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and a number of NGOs. He serves on the Board of Food first and the Pacific Institute.
Faculty & Presenters
Jonathan Becker is a founder and principal with the Headlands Consulting Group. He helps teams in a variety of industries achieve rapid results through more authentic, effective and efficient interactions. With more than ten years of management consulting experience, he has worked with industry leaders such as Cisco, Wells Fargo, Barclay's Global Investors, U.C. Berkeley, Statoil, Comcast, and IBM.
Before founding Headlands, Jonathan was a Principal with The Trium Group, a boutique strategy and leadership consulting firm in San Francisco. Earlier, Jonathan was a managing consultant for Towers Perrin's strategy and organization consulting group. Before earning an MBA, Jonathan worked for Public Citizen, a policy and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. There he specialized in energy-related issues. He supports local non-profit organizations through pro-bono consulting and donations.
Janine Benyus graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University, New Jersey, with two degrees in Natural Resource Management and English Literature/Writing. She is a natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including her latest- Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that models a prairie, businesses that run like redwood forests).
In 1998, Janine co-founded an education and innovation practice called Biomimicry Guild. Through workshops, research reports, biological consulting, and field excursions, the Guild helps innovators learn from and emulate natural models. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies that create conditions conducive to life.
In addition to her biomimicry work, Janine teaches interpretive writing, lectures at the University of Montana, and works towards restoring and protecting wild lands. She serves on a number of land use committees in her rural county, and is president of Living Education, a nonprofit dedicated to place-based living and learning.
Severin Borenstein is the Co-Director of CSEM, a Professor of Business Economics at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and Director of the University of California Energy Institute. Professor Borenstein holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. His research focuses on business competition and government regulation. He is the author of many articles on competition in electricity markets and on the gasoline and oil markets. Professor Borenstein also has done extensive research on the airline industry. He has advised many state and federal agencies and state and foreign governments on energy and airline matters. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jean Brittingham is the Director in North America for the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, joining in this role after five years on the core faculty. She has worked extensively in North America and internationally and brings a strong background in bridging organizational and cultural barriers for success in corporate and community initiatives. Jean's competence in building unique networks and linking synergistic efforts led to the convening of a world-class Advisory Board at EcoMedia. She was the Global Technology Director for Civil Infrastructure at CH2M Hill and has held program and policy positions in state and local government. Jean is also the founder and CEO of SmartGirls, a for benefit organization supporting women in creating their own businesses and achieving financial equity.
John Chiang is an Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on large-scale tropical atmosphere-ocean (and increasingly, land) systems and their interactions with the global climate. His line of work includes examining ocean-atmosphere interactions in different ocean basins, and the interactions between them; to interactions between the extratropics and tropics, considering processes as far removed as the thermohaline circulation, and building ice sheets. John holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Whitney Hischier is the Assistant Dean for the Center for Executive Education at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Haas, Whitney was a consultant for Deloitte, KPMG's London practice, and ABN Amro Bank in Amsterdam. She holds an MBA from Haas with an emphasis on Non-Profit and Public Management, and a BA from Stanford in International Relations.
Dr. Melissa Lane has an A.B. summa cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard, and an M.Phil. and PhD in Philosophy from Cambridge. There, she studied as a Marshall, Truman, and Phi Beta Kappa scholar, Dr Lane's work has focused on the history of political thought and political philosophy, with distinctive strength in ancient Greek political thought while spanning both the ancients and the moderns. Her expertise in the area of ancient political thought is widely recognized, building on her book-length studies of Plato's Statesman and the modern reception of Plato, and recently expanded in a series of articles as well as a new Introduction to the Penguin edition of Plato's Republic; a conference paper (work in progress) on the ancient Greek origins of the distinction between 'statesmen' and 'demagogues' was cited in The New York Times (17 April 2006).
In 2007 and 2008, Dr Lane is the Academic Secretary of the Faculty of History, responsible for the undergraduate teaching program and many other aspects of the Faculty's work. In the University, she is a Syndic of the Cambridge University Press and sits on the Management Board of the Cambridge Programme for Industry. She has previously served as an elected member of the University Council, which is the highest governing body of the University.
Kevin McCullough earned his education in BEng (Hon) Mechanical & Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Lincolnshire & Humberside. Currently he is Chief Operating Officer at RWE Innogy GmbH, Essen, and is responsible for Wind UK, Wind Western Europe, Wind Eastern Europe, Wind Offshore, Wind Onshore, Procurement and Technical Support.
Kellie McElhaney is the John C. Whitehead Faculty Fellow of Corporate Responsibility and the Founding Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She developed and launched this new center in January 2003, which has helped place corporate responsibility squarely as one of the core competencies and competitive advantages of the Haas School. In her five years at Haas, the Center has received global critical acclaim. The Financial Times rated Haas number one in the world in January 2008. The Wall Street Journal ranked Haas as the number two business school in the country for CSR in 2006 and 2007.
Chris Somerville is the Director of the Energy Bioscience Institute at UC Berkeley, collaboration with BP on synthetic biofuels. He is a leading authority on the structure and function of plant cell walls, and an award-winning plant biochemist who directs the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology, a non-profit scientific research organization located at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Genetics from the University of Alberta.
