Susan Capalbo has been involved in the economics of climate change, carbon sequestration and integrated policy analysis and tradeoff assessment for the past 15 years. Most recently, she has been the Director of the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership since its inception in 2003. The Partnership has been funded by US DOE to address the opportunities and challenges for carbon sequestration in both geological and terrestrial sinks. The pilot and large scale injection demonstration tests are the hallmark of the seven partnerships and include detailed monitoring, measurement, and validation analyses as well as economic assessments of costs of CCS and regulatory, risk management and legal issues associated with long term storage and liability. To date, the Big Sky Partnership has been funded at over $15M and reflects collaboration among research institutions, industry, and state and environmental agencies in WA, OR, ID, MT and WY region, and with international partners in Canada and Norway. Complimentary to the efforts on geological sequestration, Susan Capalbo was the PI for the MSU CASMGS effort (2002-2006), a multi-year nine institution effort to address terrestrial sequestration of GHG funded through USDA. She served on the Executive Committee for the CASMGS efforts and is currently working with private foundations and government agencies to extend the research and outreach efforts for carbon offsets and terrestrial sequestration.

In addition to the recent research on climate change and carbon sequestration, Susan has been involved in integrating science and economics in addressing issues of sustainable agricultural policies in both developed and developing countries. Her research on conceptual frameworks for disciplinary integration and policy analysis has been funded by NSF, Rockefeller Foundation, USDA and USAID.

Susan Capalbo has developed an extensive program in the area of interdisciplinary science research and promoting women in the research arena at MSU. As the Director of Special Projects in the VPR Office, Susan has written and been awarded several diversity and social science research collaborative grants from NSF. She is the PI for an NSF ADVANCE Leadership Award to advance women as research leaders, the PI on a second NSF grant to quantify the value of diversity in the STEM disciplines, and most recently was awarded (coPI) an NSF under the global scholars program. Under her direction, the NSF grants and her appointment in the VPR Office will help advance women as research leaders via a sustainable, tiered and cascading system of mentoring and professional development. Finally she was recently awarded a prestigious Marie Thorpe Fellowship through the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the NSF ADVANCE program to integrate her research and leadership in area of climate change and economics of clean coal technology on a national and global basis.

Susan Capalbo received her Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California-Davis in 1982. She is currently the Director of Special Research Projects in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Creativity and Technology Transfer and a Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She is also a Marie Tharp Fellow at the Earth Institute, Columbia University with a visiting appointment for AY 07-08.