Board of Directors
Md Rumi Shammin | President-Elect
Dr. Md Rumi Shammin is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College. He has a Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign and a Master’s in Natural Resources with a minor in Agricultural & Biological Engineering from Cornell University. His undergraduate training is in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh Institute of Technology, Khulna. Before joining Oberlin College in 2007, he worked as a Post-doctoral Research Associate with the Environmental Council at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign for a year. Prior to this he taught at North South University in Bangladesh for five years between 1996 and 2001. Dr. Shammin’s scholarship focuses on energy and climate change analysis, their impacts, and the policies surrounding these matters both in the US and abroad. He studies behavioral and human dimensions of environmental studies with regards to energy and resource use; ecological economics; refugee camp environmental management; environmental justice; and applied research on sustainability in the built environment. His articles have been published in journals such as Ecological Economics, Ecological Indicators, Energy Policy, Landscape and Urban Planning, Solutions Journal, Gastronomica, and PloS One. Dr. Shammin became a member of USSEE as a graduate student in 2004, later served as a board member (2012-14), and co-chaired the 2015 USSEE-CANSEE Biennial Conference in Vancouver. During field research in Bangladesh, he collaborated with members of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), became a life member of INSEE, and is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the INSEE journal. Most recently, he co-edited a volume with collaborators in South Asia on Climate Change and Community Resilience: Insights from South Asia published by Springer Nature in 2022. This open-access volume has been accessed more than 300K times and includes several chapters coauthored by Dr. Shammin that represent a decade of field work and research in climate vulnerable communities of Bangladesh.
John Polimeni President
John Polimeni is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a M.A. in Economics and a Certificate of Graduate Studies in Regulatory Economics from S.U.N.Y. at Albany, and a Ph.D. in Ecological Economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was awarded a Fulbright Senior Fellowship to Romania, where he is a Honorary Member of the Institute of Economic Forecasting in the National Institute of Economic Research in the Scientific Council of the Romanian Academy. He has received several research grants on his work in the area of economic development and the environment. John has published 60 peer-reviewed research articles, published four books, and eleven chapters in edited books. He has presented his research 81 times at international conferences with an additional eleven conference abstracts or posters. In addition, he serves or has served on 14 editorial boards of academic journals. John is a reviewer for the Romanian Fulbright Commission and serves as a reviewer for numerous academic journals. Lastly, John has been elected to two terms of the Schenectady (N.Y.) City Council and is a Fellow for the Elected Officials Protecting America – a group of policy-makers concerned about climate change and the environment.
John A. Sorrentino Secretary-Treasurer
John A. Sorrentino was a charter member of ISEE/USSEE. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Economics at Temple University. He was a co-founder of Temple University’s Environmental Studies Program, and was honored by the University with a 1999 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Most of his publications and consulting work have involved the micro-economics of energy and the environment, and have appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Environmental Economics & Management, Environmental Management, Landscape & Urban Planning, & Sustainability. He also has an essay entitled “Containing Carbon through Cap and Trade or a Per Unit Tax” forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Environmental Economics edited by James Kahn. His works-in-progress include such topics as sustainable housing placement, environmental information systems, sustainable business practices, urban agriculture, and using environmental and health amenities to offset wealth inequality. John received his B.B.A. from Baruch College of the City University of New York and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, all in economics.Tania Briceno | Member At-Large
Tania Briceno is an ecological economist with over 20 years of experience in environmental valuations, socioeconomic analyses, and ecosystem service assessments. She currently oversees the standards for ecosystem service valuations at the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), working with the private sector on the integration of ecosystem services into financial decisions. Before joining IEG, Tania conducted ecosystem service valuations for various organizations, including government agencies, special interest groups, and the private sector. She served as Lead Economist at Conservation Strategy Fund and was a part of the leadership team at Earth Economics. Additionally, she worked with the National Round Table on the Environment and Economy in Canada and held positions at several universities in Europe and North America.
Tania holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics from the University of Montreal, a Master’s in Ecological Economics from Leeds University, and a BA in Economics and International Development from McGill University. She has published in various journals such as Nature, Sustainability, and Ecosystem Services. In 2022, she was awarded the Herman Daly Award by the US Society of Ecological Economists in recognition of her efforts to apply ecological economics to create practical, sustainable, and equitable solutions.
Erik Nordman | Member At-Large
Dr. Erik Nordman is a Professor of Natural Resources Management and an Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, and an Affiliate Scholar at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop. Nordman applies his expertise in the economic and policy dimensions of natural resources to issues ranging from urban stormwater management and land preservation to renewable energy. In 2021, Nordman published The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action (Island Press) which chronicles the life and work of the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Nordman holds a BS in Biology from SUNY Geneseo as well as an MS in forest ecosystem management and a PhD in natural resource policy and economics, both from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He served as a Fulbright Scholar and visiting professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, 2012-13. His publications are available at https://works.bepress.com/erik_nordman/.
Seth Binder | Member At-Large
Seth Binder is an Associate Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at St Olaf College, currently serving as chair of the Environmental Studies department. His teaching includes courses in Economic Development, Environmental Economics, Environmental Policy & Regulation, Sustainable Development, and Sustainable Land Use in Costa Rica. Seth’s research focuses on how best to manage land, resources, and ecosystems in consideration of both efficiency and equity criteria, and, more recently, on the importance of access to land to support livelihoods and equitable, sustainable development. His research has been published in diverse, interdisciplinary journals, including Ecological Economics, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Human Ecology, Journal of Benefit-Costs Analysis, and PNAS. Seth holds a PhD in Environmental Economics from the Yale School of the Environment, an MSc in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BSFS in International Political Economy from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Michael Meneses | Graduate Student Representative
Michael A. Meneses is a graduate student at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics at Cornell University. In his graduate work, he uses optimal control theory to study how interactions between ecological and economic systems affect optimal farm management. More broadly, he is interested in using various dynamic modeling methods and econometric techniques, along with insights from natural sciences, to help inform sustainable production practices and policy. While a graduate student at Cornell, Michael has TAed multiple courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including Resource Economics, Applied Macroeconomics, and Corporate Sustainability. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he also served as a project manager in the Cornell Graduate Consulting Club, during which time he advised clients on strategies for reducing their GHG footprints. Before joining the Dyson School, Michael worked in the Social and Economic Policy Division at Abt Associates and was a project manager at the environmental non-profit, QLF. He has a BA in Environmental Studies from Brown University and an MSc in Applied Economics from Cornell University.
Liam Grima | Member At-Large
Liam Grima is a Master of Science (M.S.) student at the University of Vermont (UVM), majoring in community development and applied economics with a concentration in ecological economics. Working with behavioral economist Dr. Trisha Shrum and ecological economist Joshua Farley, Liam is a fellow of the Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) project—a collaborative community initiative between UVM and McGill University that aims to understand the system dynamics behind the Anthropocene and pave the way for a new geological epoch where humans live justly in harmony with biophysical systems.
Liam received his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) with honors from the environmental studies department at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) at Syracuse University. As an undergraduate, he worked with Dr. Valerie Luzadis, an ecological economist who helped found the United States Society for Ecological Economics (USSEE), and Dr. Paul Hirsch, a public policy expert, to cross disciplines and investigate how social norms and identities influence international climate change policy. They recognized that climate change is a symptom of overshoot driven by the exponential growth model. Simultaneously, Liam served as a summer sustainability coordinator in 2021, before transitioning to an intern researcher and consultant role at the Sustainable Materials Management Center and Resource Recycling Systems corporation over the next two years. He is now applying his experiences to research the evolutionary dynamics of the economy, with a particular focus on how cultural and biological evolution interact to create unique systems of production and consumption.
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