Office of the Climate Change Advisor

Contact Our Staff

Dave Cleaves - Climate Change Advisor to the Chief

202-205-1278 | Email

Dave Cleaves has worked for the Forest Service for more than 20 years. In March 2010, Dave was selected by Chief Tidwell to be the Climate Change Advisor. In this role, he serves the Chief, executive leadership, and the field by coordinating activities related to climate change. Dave is the primary spokesperson for the agency on climate change and leads the implementation of the Forest Service's nationwide strategy for weaving climate change response into policies, processes, and partnerships.

Dave was formerly the Associate Deputy Chief of Forest Service Research & Development, the agency's science and technology program. He has also been the director of the Rocky Mountain Research Station and staff director for national research programs in economics, forest products, social science, recreation and tourism, urban forestry, science education, and the Resources Planning Act assessment. Additionally, he led the agency's research and development programs in fire behavior and prediction, fuels management, planning and economics, and human dimensions.

Dave's specialty is decision science and risk analysis. He was formerly the national decision science specialist in the Forest Service where he developed methods and tools for improving environmental analysis and decision processes. Prior to his career in the Forest Service, he was a professor of forest marketing and economics at Oregon State University. Dave has a B.S. and M.S. from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in economics from Texas A&M University.

In his spare time, Dave is an avid fly-fisherman and teaches fishing and casting clinics for groups such as Project Healing Waters for disabled active military service personnel and veterans and Casting for Recovery for breast cancer survivors.

Elizabeth Reinhardt - Forester

202-205-8513 | Email

Elizabeth Reinhardt started working for the Forest Service as a seasonal employee in 1978. At the time she was heading off to law school, but a summer in the woods shifted her plans. She spent most of her career at the Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory where she was a research forester. Her research focused on fire ecology and wildland fuel treatment, and she spent many summers on steep slopes counting sticks and weighing branches. She is the principle developer of FOFEM (a First Order Fire Effects Model) and FFE-FVS (the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator. She served as Project Leader of the Fire Ecology and Fuels Project, and the Director of the Fire Modeling Institute for several years.

She has degrees in English (A.B., Harvard University), and forestry (M.S. and Ph.D., University of Montana). In 2006 she spent a sabbatical year as a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Center for the Environment studying climate change and environmental policy. She was also an affiliate of the Belfer Center for International Development’s Science, Environment, and Development Group at the Kennedy School of Government.

In 2009 she came to Washington DC as a member of the Policy Analysis staff, and has  served in the new Climate Change Advisor’s Office since it was established in 2010.

Cathy Dowd - Natural Resource Specialist

202-205-1384 | Email

Cathy Dowd joined the Forest Service in May 2009. She has a Master's of Public Policy with a focus on environmental policy from the University of Maryland in beautiful College Park and an M.S. in Physical Geography from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, home of the first barbed wire factory. She obviously liked graduate school, but has no plans to finish the dissertation in fluvial geomorphology and environmental change that she started at Michigan State University. Before coming to the Forest Service, she taught physical and regional geography, cartography, and GIS at some very lovely liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. She loves her current job so much that she's willing to live in Washington, DC.

Wilma Fant - Staff Assistant

202-205-0838

Wilma Fant serves as Staff Assistant to the Climate Change Advisor in the Office of the Chief. She relocated to the Washington Office from the Southern Research Station in Asheville, NC where she served as Executive Assistant to three Assistant Directors of Research. Wilma has an Associate's Degree in Business Administration from Asheville Buncombe Technical College and a B.S. in Business Management from Mars Hill College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude.