Dr. Lisa Shaffer is the Executive Director of the UC San Diego campus-wide Sustainability Solutions Institute and an adjunct professor in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UCSD. Lisa spent the first 25 years of her career in Washington, DC, in a variety of positions in NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the private sector, focusing on international cooperation in studying the earth from space.  In 1998 she joined Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she was responsible for international relations and program development for nine years.  In September 2007, she left Scripps to join the UCSD Office of Research Affairs to devote her time to building a sustainability program across the UCSD campus, and to pursue an executive MBA at UCSD’s Rady School of Management. She earned her BA in political science and international relations from the University of Michigan, and her PhD in public policy almost 20 years later from the George Washington University.