Officials from President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team have announced that his choice for the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is Lisa Perez Jackson, who earned an M.S.E. from Princeton’s Department of Chemical Engineering in 1986. Her thesis, advised by the late Professor Ernest F. Johnson and entitled, “An Investigation of the Cyanide Complexes of Zinc, Cadmium, and Copper Sorbed onto Anionic Resin”—a fundamental study with applications to the treatment of wastewater—launched a career in the environmental area. After receiving her MSE, Jackson worked for two years as an engineer for Clean Sites Inc., a nonprofit organization created to manage cleanups of Superfund sites. Subsequently, Jackson joined the EPA, spending 16 years in its Washington and New York offices working on the Superfund program and other aspects of hazardous waste cleanup, while rising to become the EPA’s Deputy Director of Enforcement and Compliance for its Region 2, which includes New Jersey. In 2002, she joined the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) as Assistant Commissioner. She was named Commissioner of the NJDEP in early 2006 by newly-elected Governor Jon Corzine, and served in that position until the end of last month, when she was named to be Gov. Corzine’s Chief of Staff. As NJDEP Commissioner, Jackson led a department staff of 3,000 professionals responsible for protecting, sustaining, and enhancing New Jersey’s water, air, and land and preserving its wealth of natural and historic resources. During her tenure, New Jersey developed its first energy master plan, and also began to implement the state’s Global Warming Response Act, calling for major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.