Assoc. Prof. Tanja Srebotnjak, PhD
Associate Professor Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak is a Partner of Ecologic Institute. She headed the Institute's office in San Mateo, California, until 2014. Trained as both an environmental statistician and a biostatistician, she worked primarily on statistical methods and concepts for developing indicators to assess environmental performance, benchmarking sustainability objectives, measuring disparities in access to healthcare, forecasting healthcare needs, and small area estimation of health risks and outcomes. A native speaker of German, she is fluent in English and has the United Nations certificate of proficiency in Russian.
Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak joined Ecologic Institute in 2009 as a Konrad von Moltke [1] Fellow. She routinely applied her statistical and analytical skills to help answer a broad range of public policy questions. Relevant projects included the measurement of anthropogenic environmental pressures at national and EU levels [2], the characterization and measurement of sustainable communities [3], the identification and management of ecological threshold phenomena [4], the role of local and regional authorities in the successful implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy [5], including rural-urban energy systems [6], and the evaluation of climate change targets and associated policies [7].
In addition, she conducted research on small area estimation of environmental and behavioral health risk factors [8], system-level health disparities in the US [9], and human migration across ecosystems linked to climate change [10]. She expanded her work into energy and resource efficiency [11].
Recent and ongoing projects included:
- Coordinator and Editor-in-Chief for the Indicators for a Sustainable San Mateo County [3] Report in 2013-2015 in partnership with Sustainable San Mateo County
- Evaluation of the World Health Organization [12] (WHO) Environmental Burden of Disease Method in the context of Germany for the Federal Environment Agency [13] (UBA), 2012-2014
- A Framework Service contract on Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Space Policy with the European Union's (EU) Committee of the Regions [14] (CoR), 2012-2013
- A Framework Contract on the Implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy for the EU Committee of the Regions [14], 2011-2013
- Further development of the Composite Index on Environmental Pressures [15] for the EU Directorate-General Environment [16], 2011-2012
- Publications on EU Sustainable Development Indicators [17] for the Rio+20 Summit in June 2012 for Eurostat [18]
Prior to joining Ecologic Institute, Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [19] and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs [20] at the University of Washington in Seattle. She completed her PhD in environmental statistics and policy in 2007 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and her MSc in statistics (2001) at the University of Auckland and Dortmund Technical University while holding a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation [21]. Noteworthy in relation to her stay at Yale University is the Environmental Performance Measurement [22] Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy [23], which she directed from 2003 to 2006 and which publishes the Environmental Sustainability Index and the Environmental Performance Index [24]. From 2000 until 2003, Dr. Tanja Srebotnjak was a statistician in the United Nations Statistics Division [25] in New York.
Tanja Srebotnjak is also an Associate Editor of Environmetrics [26] and a Research Affiliate at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy [23].
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