Alison Macfarlane, chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), has announced that she is leaving her post and will join the faculty at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in January. She will teach a course during the spring semester on “Energy and Society.”
Dr. Macfarlane has been chair of the NRC since July 2012. Prior to beginning her term as the NRC’s 15th chairman, Dr. Macfarlane was an associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is the co-editor of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006).
A native of Connecticut, Dr. Macfarlane is a graduate of the University of Rochester in New York. She earned a Ph.D. in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.