Tanja Srebotnjak, PhD
PhD (Environmental Statistics and Policy)
Board Member
Executive Director, Zilkha Center for the Environment, Williams College
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak is a Partner of Ecologic Institute. In her role as the Executive Director of the Zilkha Center for the Environment at Williams College she develops and implements strategic objectives for advancing campus sustainability efforts, devises co-curricular programs for students and promotes active engagement with local and regional communities. She also works with the Hopkins Memorial Forest Manager and Users Committee to protect and enhance the forest's long-term health and use as a resource for teaching, research, recreation and sustainability, and collaborates with the Environmental Justice Clinic in empowering disadvantaged communities to effectively tackle legacies of environmental pollution. A native speaker of German, she is fluent in English and holds the United Nations certificate of language proficiency in Russian (UN-LPE).
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak joined Ecologic Institute in 2009 as a Konrad von Moltke Fellow and from 2010 until 2014 developed and headed the Institute's office in San Mateo, California. She routinely applied her statistical and analytical skills to help answer a broad range of environmental policy questions. Relevant projects include the measurement of anthropogenic environmental pressures at national and EU levels, the characterization and measurement of sustainable communities, the identification and management of ecological threshold phenomena, the identification of the role of local and regional authorities in the successful implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy, including rural-urban energy systems, as well as the evaluation of climate change targets and associated policies. Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak also conducted research on human migration across ecosystems linked to climate change and expanded her knowledge in the areas of energy and resource efficiency.
Prior to joining Ecologic Institute, Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak worked as statistician in the United Nations Statistics Division in New York from 2000 until 2003. Later, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, she developed innovative statistical methods for the small-scale estimation of environmental and behavioral health risk factors and also contributed to the ‘Global Burden of Disease’ study. Before coming to Williams College in 2021, she led a wide range of research projects in environmental health and sustainability as a member of the engineering faculty and as the Inaugural Director of the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California.
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak completed her PhD in environmental statistics and policy in 2007 at the Yale School of the Environment. Noteworthy in relation to her stay at Yale University is the Environmental Performance Measurement Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, which she directed from 2003 to 2006, and which publishes the Environmental Performance Index. She also holds a MSc in statistics (2001) from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and a Diploma in statistics with a minor in theoretical medicine from the Technical University Dortmund (Germany), where she was awarded a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.