Mark Schaefer is presently President and CEO of the Association for Biodiversity Information, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing data and tools to inform conservation decision making. From 1996 to 2000 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science. In this position he provided policy guidance to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. He also oversaw the Federal Geographic Data Committee, the federal government's coordinating body for geospatial data. In addition he served as chair of the National Science and Technology Council's Ecological Systems Subcommittee which is responsible for coordinating ecosystem science activities across federal agencies. He was a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Morris K. Udall Foundation from 1996 to 2000.
Dr. Schaefer was Acting Director of the USGS from October of 1997 to February of 1998. He previously served for three years as Assistant Director for Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was responsible for a variety of environmental science, technology, and education issues.
From 1989 to 1993, he served as senior staff associate and director of the Washington Office of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, an activity of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. While with Carnegie he contributed to a number of studies related to U.S. environmental and science policy. He was a staff member at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) from 1987 to 1989, first as a congressional science fellow and then as director of OTA's study of the effects of toxic substances on the nervous system. For five years beginning in 1988, he taught an environmental policy seminar for Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program. A biologist by training, he received a B.A. (Zoology and Botany) from the University of Washington, and Ph.D. (Neurosciences) from Stanford University. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1977, he worked for five years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development.
