Assoc. Prof. Tanja Srebotnjak, PhD
PhD (Environmental Statistics and Policy)
Board Member
Director, Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives, Williams College
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak is a Partner of Ecologic Institute. In her role as the Director of the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives at Williams College she directs campus sustainability efforts, supports strategic planning and facilitates the decarbonization of campus operations. From 2015-2020 she pursued a wide range of environmental health and sustainability projects and research as a member of the faculty and the inaugural Director of the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design at Harvey Mudd College.
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak joined the Ecologic Institute in 2009 as a Konrad von Moltke Fellow and from 2010 until 2014 she headed the Institute's office in San Mateo, California. She routinely applied her statistical and analytical skills to help answer a broad range of public policy questions. Relevant projects included 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 role of local and regional authorities in the successful implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy, including rural-urban energy systems, and the evaluation of climate change targets and associated policies. Tanja also conducted research on human migration across ecosystems linked to climate change and expanded her work into energy and resource efficiency.
Prior to joining Ecologic Institute, Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation where she developed innovative statistical methods for small area estimation of environmental and behavioral health risk factors, system-level health
disparities in the US, and contributed to the Global Burden of Disease study. From 2000 until 2003, Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak was a statistician in the United Nations Statistics Division in New York.
Tanja completed her PhD in environmental statistics and policy in 2007 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, her MSc in statistics (2001) at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and her Dipl. Stat. at the Dortmund Technical University (Germany) while holding a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. 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.
Tanja Srebotnjak is also an Associate Editor of Environmetrics. A native speaker of German, she is fluent in English and has the United Nations certificate of proficiency in Russian.