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Responsibilities: Dr. Alan D. Thornhill is the Director of the Office of Science Quality and Integrity, and the Bureau Scientific Integrity Officer (BSIO) and oversees USGS operations in this discipline.

Career History and Highlights: Formerly, he was the Chief Environmental Officer and the Science Advisor to the Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI). From 2001 to 2010, he was the Executive Director of the Society for Conservation Biology - an international society of conservation professionals working to advance the science and practice of protecting life on Earth. Previously he was the Director of Learning and Communications for the Science Division for The Nature Conservancy (the global organization), and faculty in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. For more than 15 years, Dr. Thornhill has worked in conservation at the nexus between academic research and application of science to conservation and policy. For over a decade, Thornhill has focused his attention on climate change, adaptation science, and related topics. At the DOI he has been the Department's Principle representative to the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and until 2013 he was the DOI Principle to the Ocean Resource Management Interagency Policy Committee (ORM-IPC) of the National Ocean Council (NOC). Since 2004 he has been part-time faculty in the College of Natural Resources, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where he teaches applied conservation courses focusing on human and green infrastructure and how the two can be leveraged in service to sustainability.

Education: Dr. Thornhill earned his Bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees in Ecology from the University of California, Irvine.