Environmental activist Mathy V. Stanislaus ’88 has been named by President Barack Obama to serve as assistant administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER).
As Assistant Administrator for OSWER, Mr. Stanislaus is responsible for EPA programs on hazardous and solid waste management and hazardous waste cleanup, including corrective action under the Reconservation and Recovery Act. He will also oversee Superfund and federal facilities cleanup and redevelopment, brownfields, oil spill prevention and response, chemical accident prevention and preparedness, underground storage tanks, and emergency response.
Mr. Stanislaus brings to his new position academic training in chemical engineering and law combined with more than two decades of experience with environmental issues.
Prior to being named to the EPA earlier this year, he served as co-founder and co-director of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a New York-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the renewal of the city’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and communities of color through the redevelopment of brownfields sites.
In collaboration with community, commercial, government and nonprofit partners, Mr. Stanislaus led the development of policies, programs and projects aimed at achieving the remediation and sustainable reuse of Brownfields sites in New York.
Mr. Stanislaus is a former counsel for EPA’s Region 2. He has also served as senior environmental associate in the environmental department of the law firm Huber Lawrence & Abell, and as director of environmental compliance for an environmental consulting firm. He has served on the board of the Environmental Justice Alliance in New York.
Mr. Stanislaus has also been an adviser to other federal government agencies, Congress and the United Nations on a variety of environmental issues. In 1997, he chaired a workgroup of the United States Environmental Protection Agency that investigated the clustering of waste transfer stations in low-income and communities of color throughout the United States.
In June 1994, as a member of the United Nations Environment Programme – Environmental Advisory Council, Mr. Stanislaus served as counsel to the United Nations summit that examined environmental issues affecting New York’s indigenous communities of the Haudaunosaunee Confederacy.
