Sabine O’Hara, PhD

Dr. Sabine O’Hara is a teacher, mentor, researcher and administrator committed to improving lives in underserved communities. She currently leads an innovative PhD program in Urban Leadership & Entrepreneurship at the University of the District of Columbia, which is the only public university in Washington DC and the only exclusively urban Land-grant University in the United States. Prior to her current appointment she served as Dean of the College of Agriculture Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences (CAUSES) and led the University’s efforts to build a cutting-edge model for urban agriculture and urban sustainability that integrates training in the agricultural, environmental and health sciences with the practical aspirations of students and residents to embark on successful careers in the green economy.

Dr. O’Hara’s work has focused consistently on the quality of life and economic opportunity of local communities through multi-dimensional intellectual, social, and physical capacity development. A foundation of her work is her belief that education should not only answer our questions, but also question our answers. This search for new answers has guided her work as the 10thPresident of Roanoke College in Virginia; provost of Green Mountain College in Vermont; faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York; and executive director of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), which administers the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Program. She holds Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Agricultural Economics and Environmental Economics from the University of Göttingen, Germany and is an affiliated faculty member with the Working Group on Institutional Analysis of Socio-Ecological Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. O’Hara is the past President of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and the US Society for Ecological Economics (USSEE) and serves on various advisory and editorial board.