Rod Schoonover
Director of Environment and Natural Resources, National Intelligence Council
Rod Schoonover is the Director of Environment and Natural Resources for the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he oversees the intelligence community’s analytic program on the national security implications of environmental change. His specialties are climate change, water security, food security, strategic minerals, wildlife trafficking, and marine health. Before transitioning to the NIC Dr. Schoonover was the senior scientist in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research for six years. Prior to coming to the federal government as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Diplomacy Fellow in 2009, he was a tenured full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Schoonover earned his PhD in theoretical chemical physics at the University of Michigan where he studied complex systems and chaos theory.