Philanthropist John Cazier
Photo by Diane Baldwin/RAND Corporation
A $5 million gift from engineer and philanthropist John M. Cazier will turbocharge research in environmental and energy sustainability at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
This donation establishes the John and Carol Cazier Environmental and Energy Sustainability Initiative, which will help generate new concepts, tools, and methods to share findings, ideas, and insights clearly and broadly, so that they can improve public policy, foster better practices in the field, and be applied in the commercial sector to benefit people throughout the world.
“John Cazier has been an inventor and innovator in automotive engineering,” said Susan Marquis, dean at Pardee RAND. “We're grateful for John's financial support and his forward thinking on green practices and sustainability.”
Developing, sharing, and applying new ways to tackle existing and emerging problems across a broad number of fields, including the environment, engineering, and sustainability, has long been a hallmark of RAND and is integral to the scholarly work at Pardee RAND, Marquis noted.
“I'm truly impressed with the intellectual capacities of Pardee RAND and RAND,” John Cazier said. “After having success in the engineering and automotive industry, I want to ensure that the right bridges get built between the research powerhouses of RAND and Pardee RAND, the commercial world, and the best practitioners in the field. People around the planet must deal with so many challenges, today and in the days ahead, that we need to share information, get smarter, and do so with all of us in our different spots pulling together.”
Under the initiative—which also honors John Cazier's late wife, Carol—the graduate school will bring important visiting fellows to campus and provide valuable research and dissemination tools to students and faculty members. The visiting fellows—some of the best minds and practitioners in their fields—will challenge, inspire, inform, and educate Ph.D. candidates, faculty, RAND researchers, and the RAND community—and it is hoped that being part of the RAND community will broaden the visitors' horizons, too.
There will be support to allow faculty, with student assistance, to pursue new work and extend RAND and graduate school research, with a particular emphasis on disseminating this work and getting it into the hands of decisionmakers and practitioners. To have the most impact with the widest possible audiences, Cazier's gift will underwrite materials that communicate in nontechnical, direct, visual, and simple ways about advances or key policies on the environment, sustainability, engineering, and technology transfer.
Further, the John M. Cazier Endowed Dissertation for Sustainability award will support Ph.D. candidates pursuing dissertations on topics that have potential policy impact in energy and environmental sustainability. These Pardee RAND students will be encouraged to think deeply about innovative and better approaches to developing energy resources; to address threats to the environment and standards of living, broadly defined; and to articulate how science, technology, and policy can address them.
Pardee RAND was founded in 1970 as one of eight graduate schools created to train future leaders in the public and private sectors in policy analysis. The school is a Ph.D.-granting institution unique for its relationship with the RAND Corporation, an internationally respected public policy research organization.
