Lisa Shaffer

Encinitas, CA

Dr. Lisa Shaffer is a Lecturer at the Rady School of Management, where she teaches “Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility” and  “Organizational Leadership.” She was the founding Executive Director of the University of California, San Diego campus-wide Sustainability Solutions Institute (SSI) and its predecessor, the Environment and Sustainability Initiative.  She now serves on the leadership team of SSI, developing and managing interdisciplinary translational research addressing challenges in water and climate, the built environment, and “greenovation” – the transfer of academic discovery into products and services in the public and private sector.

Lisa spent the first 25 years of her career in Washington, DC, in a variety of positions in NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and with a major aerospace company in the private sector.  Most of her work focused on international cooperation in studying the earth from space.  In 1998 she joined Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she was responsible for international relations and program development for nine years.    In September 2007, she moved from Scripps to the UCSD Office of Research Affairs to devote her time to building a sustainability program across the UCSD campus, and to pursue an executive MBA at UCSD’s Rady School of Management, which she completed in August 2009. She earned her BA in political science and international relations from the University of Michigan, and her PhD in public policy from the George Washington University.