Liquid Assets:
Capitalizing on the Water & Energy Nexus

Liquid Assets

Edward Clerico, PE, LEED AP
Alliance Environmental, LLC

Edward Clerico is a licensed professional engineer and licensed wastewater operator in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and he is a LEED Accredited Professional. He was the founder and president of Applied Water Management, Inc., before holding executive roles with American Water as Technical Development Director and Vice President, Strategy. He now operates his own consulting business, Alliance Environmental, which focuses on green building concepts. Mr. Clerico holds BS and MS degrees from Rutgers University in Bio-Resource Engineering.


Alice Cook, LEED AP, Director of Sustainability
Time Equities, Inc.

Alice Cook is the Director of Sustainability for Time Equities, Inc., a private equity real estate company with a diverse portfolio. It owns and manages over 20 million square feet of property. A LEED Accredited Professional, she is responsible for Time Equities' corporate climate strategy and the implementation of initiatives to reduce Time Equities' carbon footprint.

Major initiatives include portfolio-wide energy/carbon audits and efficiency projects, the development of energy management tools, and the establishment of best practices to ensure high performance operations. Ms. Cook develops practical and appropriate strategies based on cost-benefit analysis and market opportunity. She also manages the LEED certification process for new developments and coordinates energy-efficiency related incentives. Her professional experience includes a broad range of projects in the environmental field, including water resources and infrastructure planning and climate change research.

Ms. Cook holds a Master's degree from Stanford University in Civil & Environmental Engineering, and a B.S. from the Stanford School of Earth Sciences. She focused her studies on solutions to macro-level environmental problems, including global warming and water resources. She conducted climate change research in Antarctica and at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.


Chris Garvin, AIA, LEED AP
Cook+Fox Architects, LLP

Chris Garvin is an accomplished practitioner and active voice in the sustainable design community. Since moving to New York in 1998 he has specialized in environmental architecture and materials research, while serving on numerous advisory boards and in organizations that advocate for sustainability in design.

Mr. Garvin serves as a project lead for many projects for Cook+Fox Architects, while also managing consulting engagements for green building think tank Terrapin Bright Green, where he is a Partner. His interests include high-performance design at both the building and community scale, zero energy communities, biomimicry, and water conservation.

Complementing his work at Terrapin, Mr. Garvin lectures frequently on sustainable design. He has taught at the Pratt Institute’s Center for Professional Practice since 2002. He also advises several organizations on sustainability issues, including the National Building Museum and the New York Academy of Sciences. He serves on the Board of Directors for the US Green Building Council – New York Chapter and on the Advisory Board for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

Mr. Garvin received a Bachelor of Architecture degree with honors from Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with noted professor Vivian Loftness. He spent a year at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. He became a Licensed Architect in 1998 and maintains professional licenses in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and North Carolina.


Susan Kaplan, LEED AP, Director
Sustainable Development
Battery Park City Authority

Susan Kaplan, Director of Sustainable Development for Battery Park City Authority, oversees green environmental guidelines that will result in the creation of five million square feet of green development in the tip of Lower Manhattan. Ms. Kaplan is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Urban Green Council, the New York Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). She is Vice Chair of the USGBC’s Technical Committee for LEED, which has become the de facto standard for sustainability for much of the country. She is also a member of the USGBC’s LEED Steering Committee.

Ms. Kaplan has presented nationally to the US Conference of Mayors, the UN, ASHRAE, NYC’s City Council, and even to the Bond Buyers of NY and the NYS Bar Association. She has led workshops and made presentations in Norway, Mexico, and Israel. She oversaw and co-presented a study on the cost of green in New York City at Greenbuild 2008, a national conference on sustainability.

Ms. Kaplan has degrees in Environmental Science and Landscape Architecture and is a LEED Accredited Professional.


Carey W. King, PhD
Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy
The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Carey King studies energy systems, how they work together, how they impact the environment, and how and why humans as a society consume energy resources. He specializes in dynamic systems modeling and nonlinear optimization methods. Much of his recent work has focused on the nexus between energy and water for projecting water demand for electricity generation and alternative automobile fuels.

As part of his energy-water studies, Dr. King has authored journal publications, a chapter for the Texas State Energy Conservation Office on the role of water in Texas's energy future, and a report for the Texas Water Development Board that projects water demand scenarios for future electricity production. Additional work in which Dr. King is engaged includes the economics of carbon capture and sequestration, the design of beneficial combinations of renewable energy and storage systems, and the creation of tools to help the public and policymakers understand the tradeoffs among different electricity generation sources.



Larry Levine, Attorney
Natural Resources Defense Council

Larry Levine is an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. For the Council’s New York/New Jersey Harbor Bight project, he works on a variety of issues pertaining to water quality, public health, and marine ecosystems in the New York and New Jersey coastal region. He was previously a litigation fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a clinical fellow in environmental law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Mr. Levine is a graduate of Yale Law School and Tulane University.


Warren Liebold, Director
Metering & Conservation
NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection

Warren Liebold is the Director of Metering/Conservation for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and is Project Manager for its Automated Meter Reading Project, for which his team won an “Excellence in Technology Award” in 2009 from the New York Technology Forum.

Since he joined DEP in 1992, Mr. Liebold has designed and managed meter installation and end-user water conservation programs, including the city’s Toilet Rebate Program (1994-1997); participated in the development of most customer service policies of the New York City Water Board; participated in most of DEP’s studies of water demand and flows; and served as a member of DEP’s Drought Emergency Variance Board (2002) and the Mayor’s Green Code Task Force (2008-2009).


Paul Mankiewicz, PhD, Executive Director
The Gaia Institute

Dr. Paul S. Mankiewicz, Executive Director of the Gaia Institute, received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York/New York Botanical Garden Joint Program in Plant Sciences. He holds patents on a modular composting system, an ultra-lightweight green roof plant growth medium, and a biogeochemical reactor to breakdown dioxins and PCBs.

Past president of the Torrey Botanical Society & board member of the NYC Soil & Water Conservation District, Dr. Mankiewicz has worked to incorporate ecology to treat water, capture carbon, and lower energy costs in urban centers. A number of working models have been constructed, including the first green roof in the Bronx, the first industrial-scale stormwater treatment facility on a six-acre, truck-to-barge material handling site on the Bronx River, and the first process water/greywater treatment green roof on the Linda Tool Corporation in Red Hook, Brooklyn.


Sri Rangarajan, PhD, PE, D.WRE, Manager
Watershed Planning Services
HydroQual, Inc.

Dr. Srinivasan (Sri) Rangarajan is an Associate Engineer at HydroQual, Inc. He serves as Practice Leader for Watershed Planning Services, focusing on urban watershed management, water quality assessment, and combined and sanitary sewer overflow and storm water management projects (CSO/SSO) in the United States, Canada, and Japan. He is a recognized expert in redevelopment, flood control, Best Management Practices/Low Impact Development evaluation, and regulation-driven projects.

In addition to extensive basic/applied research experience, Dr. Rangarajan has over 16 years of professional consulting experience in the United States, Canada, and India. He has served in lead roles in over forty challenging projects. Among them are wet weather flow management projects for over a dozen municipalities, including Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; and New York City.

Dr. Rangarajan is Vice Chair of the Water Environment Federation Watershed Management Committee. He chairs the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Wet Weather Flow Technologies Committee and leads ASCE public outreach in New Jersey for water/wastewater infrastructure improvements nationwide. He participates in research projects for USEPA, the Water Environment Research Foundation, and the ASCE Urban Water Resources Research Council.

Dr. Rangarajan received a Master’s degree in Hydromechanics and Water Resources Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science and a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. He is a licensed professional engineer in the Province of Manitoba and adjunct faculty in the Earth and Environmental Engineering Department of Columbia University. He has published widely and makes frequent presentations on technical and regulatory aspects of CSO/SSO and stormwater management. His awards include the Environmental Leadership Award from USAID and Young Engineer award from ASCE. He is a Diplomate of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers.


Jane L. Snowdon, PhD, Senior Manager
Energy and Environment: Intelligent Buildings and Smarter City Research
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

As a Senior Manager and Research Staff Member in the Industry Solutions and Emerging Business Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Dr. Jane L. Snowdon develops strategies and drives research efforts worldwide to create innovative solutions for small and medium-sized businesses in areas such as intelligent buildings, collaboration, security, remote systems management, and cloud computing. She co-led the IBM Corporate Strategy sponsored study on Industry Impacts of Climate Change and is an active contributor to the IBM Corporate Strategy Intelligent Building Study and co-leader for the Strategic Initiatives portion of the IBM Corporate Strategy Smart Cities Study. She is a thought leader and contributor to IBM’s Global Technology Outlook and Global Innovation Outlook.

Dr. Snowdon previously managed the Emerging Systems Design Department at IBM Research. She has conducted research on airline operations and has deep expertise in business process modeling and business process simulation for manufacturing and transportation. She is a member of a National Institute of Standards Smart Grid Interoperability Roadmap Working Group and several OASIS groups. She was inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech. She is active in many professional societies and serves on the boards of several academic bodies.

Dr. Snowdon received her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering and a Certificate in Manufacturing Systems from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a M.S. degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan.



As background for the conference, we highly recommend this article:

Energy versus Water: Solving Both Crises Together, by Michael E. Webber. Scientific American, October 2008.

“Water is needed to generate energy. Energy is needed to deliver water. Both resources are limiting the other—and both may be running short. Is there a way out?”


Water: An IBM Global Innovation Outlook Report

This plain-English, graphically lavish report presents insights and recommendations resulting from IBM’s consultations with hundreds of the world’s leading water management experts—scientists, academics, businesses and governments—about how we can manage water resources more wisely.