Experts & Staff

Tim Searchinger a Senior Fellow in the People and Ecosystems Program at World Resources Institute where he focuses on food security issues. He is also a Research Scholar and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and a Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Trained as a lawyer, Searchinger now works primarily on interdisciplinary environmental issues related to agriculture.

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For seventeen years, Searchinger worked at the Environmental Defense Fund, where he co-founded the Center for Conservation Incentives, and supervised work on agricultural incentive and wetland protection programs. He has also been a deputy General Counsel to Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania and a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He is a graduate, summa cum laude, of Amherst College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Searchinger first proposed the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program to USDA and worked closely with state officials to develop programs that have now restored one million acres of riparian buffers and wetlands to protect priority rivers and estuaries in Maryland, Minnesota, and Illinois, among other states. Searchinger received a National Wetlands Protection Award from the Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 for a technical book about the functions of seasonal wetlands of which he was principal author. His most recent writings focus on the greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels, and agricultural conservation strategies to clean-up nutrient runoff.