Introduction
Phil Sharp, President, RFF

Phil Sharp is president of RFF. His career in public service includes 10 terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana and a lengthy tenure on the faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard University.

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He served as director of the IOP from 1995 to 1998 and again from 2004 until August 2005. Sharp serves on the board of directors of the Energy Foundation, is co-chair of the Energy Board of the Keystone Center, and is a member of the National Research Council's Board of Energy and Environmental Systems. He received his Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University.

Moderator
Roger Sedjo
Senior Fellow and Director, Forests Economics and Policy Program
Resources For the Future

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Sedjo’s research interests include forests and global environmental problems, climate change and biodiversity, public lands issues, long-term sustainability of forests, industrial forestry and demand, timber supply modeling, international forestry, global forest trade, forest biotechnology, and land-use change.

He has written or edited 14 books related to forestry and natural resources. Sedjo has served on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Committee of Scientists and has co-chaired the committee of authors who wrote the chapter on biological sinks for the International Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report on climate change mitigation through forestry and other land-use measures. He also has been a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other international organizations in more than a dozen countries, including Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, Romania, Estonia, and Thailand.

Eric D. Larson
Research Engineer
Princeton Environmental Institute
Princeton University

Larson is on the research faculty at Princeton University as a senior member of the Energy Systems Analysis Group in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI).He is also part of PEI’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

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Presentation Slides

He is an affiliated faculty member in the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Larson’s research interests include engineering, economic, and policy-related analysis of advanced clean-energy systems, especially for gasification-based electric power and transport fuels production from carbonaceous fuels. He recently led a multi-institution assessment, supported by DOE and the America Forest and Paper Association, of prospective applications for gasification-based biorefinery technologies in the U.S. pulp and paper industry. He is involved in analysis of other bioenergy technology strategies, including those for coal and biomass co-gasification, collaborating with colleagues in the United States and China. Larson holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Washington University, and an M.S.E. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He has been at Princeton University since completing his Ph.D.

Barbara Wells, President and CEO
ArborGenLLC

Wells joined ArborGen, headquartered in Summerville, South Carolina, in 2002. Formed in 2000, ArborGen LLC is a world leader in the research, development, and commercialization of applications in genetic and new technology that will improve forest sustainability and productivity.

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Prior to joining ArborGen, Wells was vice president responsible for growth initiatives and investments in Latin America for Emergent Genetics, an agricultural investment firm affiliated with Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst. She worked for 17 years at Monsanto, as co-managing director of Monsanto Brazil, Roundup Ready Soybean global team leader, and regional product development manager for Agronomic Crops and Forestry. Wells received her Ph.D. in agronomy from Oregon State University, her M.S. in plant pathology, and her B.S. with honors in horticulture from the University of Arizona. She is a member of the Food and Agriculture Sector Governing Body of the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Board of Directors of the Institute of Forest Biotechnology. Wells also is on the Board of Trustees of the World Agroforestry Centre, part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

Stephen S. Kelley
Professor and Department Head
Wood and Paper Science
North Carolina State University

Prior to joining NCSU, Kelley spent 13 years at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), working on biomass conversion technologies. His responsibilities included technical leadership and innovation in the areas of biomass characterization, production of value-added biobased products and thermal conversion processes, and project management.

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He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Virginia Tech, an M.S. in forestry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.S. in wood science from Oregon State University. Kelley is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and has served as an adjunct professor at East Tennessee State University and Oregon State University. He has served at the division chair, program chair, and awards chair for the Cellulose and Renewable Materials Division of the American Chemical Society, and on the Long-Range Planning Committee of the Society of Wood Science and Technology. He is a fellow in the International Academy of Wood Science.

Theodore H. Wegner, Assistant Director
Forest Products Laboratory, USDA Forest Service

Wegner has served as assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory since 1989. Previously, he was a research unit leader and a research scientist. Prior to working in government, Wegner was a researcher for E. I. DuPont. Wegner’s contributions to the forest biorefinery come from his work on a variety of industry and government task groups.

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Notably, he worked with a consortium on producing ethanol from hemicelluloses extracted prior to pulping and helped develop the Forest Service research program for the bioenergy, biofuels, and bioproducts. He serves as forest service representative on the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative and has been influential in helping the U.S. forest products industry form a liaison group with the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

He holds a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, all in chemical engineering. Wegner is a member and fellow of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry and a member of the Forest Products Society, the Society of Wood Science and Technology, the Pulp and Paper Education and Research Alliance, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society, Sigma Xi Research Society, and Alpha Chi Sigma—Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Fraternity.

John C. Houghton 
Office of Biological and Environmental Reserach, U.S. Department of Energy

Houghton manages research programs in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the Office of Science. He has helped the office develop and implement a biofuels program; he also manages a computational biology program. He has directed DOE research programs in the Integrated Assessment of Climate Change, bioremediation and carbon sequestration.

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