Steve Polasky is a Regent’s Professor and holds the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Ecological/Environmental Economics at the University of Minnesota. He previously held faculty positions at Boston College and Oregon State University. He served as the senior staff economist for environment and resources for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers 1998-1999. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He also serves on the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency and is on the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy.

His research interests focus on issues at the intersection of ecology and economics and include the impacts of land use and land management on the provision and value of ecosystem services and natural capital, biodiversity conservation, sustainability, environmental regulation, and fisheries management. He contributed to the national Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). He has also worked on issues involving renewable energy, renewable and exhaustible resources, environmental regulation, and common property resources.

His research has been published in Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Frontiers of Ecology and Environment, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, and other journals. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Conservation Letters, Ecology and Society, and Ecology Letters. He was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.