Developing, sharing, and applying new ways to tackle existing and emerging problems across a broad number of fields, including the environment, engineering, and sustainability, has long been a hallmark of RAND and is integral to the scholarly work at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
A $5 million gift in May 2014 from the late engineer and philanthropist John M. Cazier is now turbocharging research in environmental and energy sustainability at Pardee RAND.
The donation established the John and Carol Cazier Environmental and Energy Sustainability Initiative, which will help generate new concepts, tools, and methods to share findings, ideas, and insights clearly and broadly, so that they can improve public policy, foster better practices in the field, and be applied in the commercial sector to benefit people throughout the world.
“I'm truly impressed with the intellectual capacities of Pardee RAND and RAND. I want to ensure that the right bridges get built between the research powerhouses of RAND and Pardee RAND, the commercial world, and the best practitioners in the field.”
— John Cazier
“John Cazier has been an inventor and innovator in automotive engineering,” said Susan Marquis, dean at Pardee RAND, in announcing the Initiative. “We're grateful for John's financial support and his forward thinking on green practices and sustainability.”
Under the initiative—which also honors Cazier's late wife, Carol—the graduate school will bring important visiting fellows to campus and provide valuable research and dissemination tools to students and faculty members. The visiting fellows—some of the best minds and practitioners in their fields—will challenge, inspire, inform, and educate Ph.D. candidates, faculty, RAND researchers, and the RAND community—and it is hoped that being part of the RAND community will broaden the visitors' horizons, too.
The Initiative also provides support to allow faculty, with student assistance, to pursue new work and extend RAND and graduate school research, with a particular emphasis on disseminating this work and getting it into the hands of decisionmakers and practitioners. To have the most impact with the widest possible audiences, the Initiative will underwrite materials that communicate in nontechnical, direct, visual, and simple ways about advances or key policies on the environment, sustainability, engineering, and technology transfer.
