President Bill Clinton has appointed Jared L. Cohon, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies F&ES, as chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
Created by Congress under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendments of 1987, the board is responsible for evaluating the U.S. Department of Energy's DOE program for the disposal, storage and shipment of high-level nuclear waste. Dean Cohon was first appointed to the board by President Clinton in 1995.
The major task facing the 11-member review board will be to evaluate the scientific and technical validity of the DOE's site characterization work at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. In 1998, the DOE plans to determine the viability of that site as a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level nuclear waste.
A national authority in water resources and environmental systems analysis, Dean Cohon became the eighth dean of F&ES in 1992 and was recently reappointed by President Richard C. Levin for an additional five-year term, beginning July 1. He previously served as legislative assistant for energy and environment to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-New York, and has conducted extensive research in the areas of nuclear waste shipping and storage.
Before coming to Yale in 1992, Dean Cohon was a faculty member at The Johns Hopkins University, where he also served as associate dean of engineering and vice provost for research.
He is an expert in systems analysis, an area of applied mathematics, and its use in natural resources and environmental management. His teaching at Yale includes a quantitative methods course and an advanced course in water resources systems analysis.
Dean Cohon is known particularly for his research in multiobjective programming, a technique for supporting decisions in the face of multiple conflicting objectives. He has developed new mathematical methods and pioneered the use of multiobjective programming for large-scale water resources planning, water quality control, energy facility siting and nuclear waste management.
Dean Cohon has chaired and served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences. Most recently, he chaired the Committee on Measuring and Improving Infrastructure Performance. He also serves on the boards of directors of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation and the Woodlands Mountain Institute, and is on the National Real Estate Advisory Board of The Nature Conservancy.
His many awards include the 1996 Joan Hodges Queneau Palladium Medal, given jointly by the National Audubon Society and the American Association of Engineering Societies for outstanding engineering achievement in environmental conservation.