Alan D. Thornhill

Dr. Alan D. Thornhill is the Director of the Office of Science Quality and Integrity, and the Bureau Scientific Integrity Officer at the USGS. Formerly, he was the Chief Environmental Officer and the Science Advisor to the Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. From 2001 to 2010, he was the Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology and prior to that he was the Director of Learning and Communications for the Science Division for The Nature Conservancy, and faculty in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  His focus at Department of Interior has been at the nexus between academic research and application of science to conservation and policy. His portfolio of activities has included climate change adaptation science as the DOI Principle representative to the US Global Change Research Program, arctic science policy as the DOI Principle to the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee and marine science policy as the DOI Principle to the Ocean Resource Management Interagency Policy Committee of the National Ocean Council. Since 2004 he has been part-time faculty in the College of Natural Resources, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He earned his Bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees in Ecology from the University of California, Irvine.