Margaret Williams Joins BAER Institute as Associate Director of Research

BAER Institute welcomes Margaret Williams as its new Associate Director of Research. Margaret comes to BAER from Impact Carbon, a non-profit organization that uses carbon finance to increase access to clean energy technologies in the developing world. Margaret served as Program Manager for carbon asset development, overseeing all survey design, fuel and emissions data collection, data analysis and document preparation for carbon asset validation and verification under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Gold Standard Registry.  She designed novel approaches for quantifying avoided greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from rural households in Asia, Africa and Latin America where multiple clean energy technologies were installed and also represented Impact Carbon on the US Technical Advisory Committee (ISO) for Clean Cookstoves and Clean Cooking Solutions.

From 2009 to 2013 Margaret was a senior climate change and air quality project manager and technical specialist at ICF International, a policy, technology and management consultancy. She developed GHG emissions inventories and reduction plans for cities and counties in California as well as analyzing environmental data for regulatory compliance. She contributed to several panels and industry white papers on how GHG emissions mitigation and climate change impacts preparation can be incorporated into local government planning. She is a certified GHG emissions auditor under the California Air Resources Board Mandatory Reporting Rule and has conducted GHG audits for landfills and oil and gas facilities under the British Columbia and Alberta reporting schemes.

Margaret holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Miami. She completed postdoctoral work at the University of California Irvine in the department of Earth System Science and also at NASA Ames Research Center.   While at UC Irvine, she held the Comer Fellowship for the Study of Abrupt Climate Change. Her research focused on the atmospheric histories of trace species such as methyl chloride and carbonyl sulfide as determined from polar ice cores. At NASA Ames Research Center, Margaret worked with Dr. Laura Iraci, examining acid catalyzed reactions of small organic compounds in aerosols. She also participated in the ARCTAS field campaign in 2008.