New Keystone Trustees Bring Valuable Experience, Perspectives to Board

KEYSTONE, CO, October 30, 2015 — Christine Scanlan, president and CEO of the Keystone Policy Center, welcomed four new national business and policy leaders to the organization’s Board of Trustees this week, citing their invaluable experiences and perspectives. Scanlan said the four — Granville Martin, Managing Director, Sustainable Finance for JP Morgan Chase; Dave McLaughlin, Vice President, Agriculture, for the World Wildlife Fund; Jim Romine, President of the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials; and Daniel Weisberg, Chief Executive Officer of TNTP — will help Keystone build on its 40 years of accomplishment and continue to inspire leaders to rise above entrenched positions to reach common higher ground.

“We are proud to welcome Granville, Dave, Jim, and Dan to Keystone’s Board of Trustees. Their experiences and dedication to our mission and vision for finding common-sense solutions to seemingly intractable policy challenges will help Keystone thrive,” Scanlan said. “I am confident our board and its new additions will continue to help Keystone identify policy issues ripe for our collaborative, action-oriented approach to problem-solving.”

Keystone’s board meets three times each year in Washington, D.C., and in Colorado. The board oversees Keystone’s work and supports its mission throughout the year.

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New Trustee Bios

Granville Martin, Managing Director, Sustainable Finance for JP Morgan Chase
Joining JPMorgan Chase in 2005, Granville is based in New York City to manage environmental risk, develop new business with a nexus to environmental protection, and analyze energy and environmental policy trends that have an impact on JPMC clients and businesses. Granville leads JPMC’s environmental due diligence effort on the oil and gas industry with a particular focus on clients engaged in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. In addition, he works across JP Morgan Chase’s lines of business to leverage regulatory and political drivers towards greater energy efficiency and distributed generation in the built environment. Granville also closely tracks and analyses energy and environmental policy and political trends with an impact on JP Morgan Chase clients and businesses.

After graduating law school in 1996, Granville joined the Office of the Counsel to Governor George Pataki of New York working on environmental issues such as wastewater treatment, New York City watershed protection and green buildings. He also worked on local government and mental health issues including negotiating with the Legislature. After leaving the Pataki Administration, Granville represented the Financial Services Forum prior to joining JP Morgan Chase in 2005.

Dave McLaughlin, Vice President, Agriculture, for the World Wildlife Fund\
After nearly 30 years in the industry Dave can grow just about anything you see in the produce section of your local grocery store, especially bananas. He spent nearly 30 years in Latin America growing bananas for one of the world’s biggest produce companies — Chiquita Brands International. At first glance it’s an interesting career path for someone with a graduate degree in finance.

If you dig a little deeper you’ll find that Dave’s love for Latin America led the way. The son of a geologist, he was born and raised in South America. After finishing graduate school in the United States, he found the perfect job in the finance department of Chiquita’s Costa Rica operation, so he sold his car at the airport and jumped on a plane.

Over the course of his career, Dave was able to make some real improvements to the agriculture industry in Latin America. In the 1980s, he was one of the few plantation managers in the oil palm industry to embrace a plan to make the farms and extraction mills more sustainable. In the 1990s when leading Chiquita’s banana operations in Costa Rica, he listened to the appeals made by environmental groups, did the math, and implemented a host of measures that made the cultivation of bananas more sustainable while contributing to the bottom line. He started with two farms in Costa Rica and ultimately executed a $20 million effort to implement the standards across Chiquita’s global operation’s in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Along the way Chiquita became the first multinational banana producer to be certified by the Rainforest Alliance in sustainable cultivation.

At WWF Dave applies these lessons learned to a host of agricultural industries including livestock, sugar cane and palm oil where he actively engages the business community to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Jim Romine, President of the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials
As President of the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the science that supports the safety of material used in the fragrance industry, provides strategic direction for a staff of highly qualified chemists and toxicologists who conduct research and generate safety assessments that are made available to industry and to the public through peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Prior to joining RIFM in 2015, Jim concluded a successful 35-year career with the DuPont Company.   His last position at DuPont was vice president of Product Stewardship and Regulatory Affairs (PS&R), a role he created in 2008. He was the first senior executive to lead the company’s functional competency in managing product stewardship and regulatory compliance for products in all markets and geographies. During his tenure, Jim helped guide the DuPont commitment for responsible creation, manufacture, and sales of products as diverse as chemicals, advanced polymers, agricultural chemicals, biotech seeds, and industrial enzymes. He built strong relationships with government regulators and other societal stakeholders worldwide. He established the Product Stewardship Council at the Conference Board, an organization that brings together the top executives in product safety at major companies across a wide spectrum of market sectors. Jim was instrumental in the creation of the Product Stewardship Society as a means of advancing a new profession of increasing business importance. He currently serves on the board of the Product Stewardship Society, the Keystone Policy Center, and the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation.

Jim began his career with DuPont in 1980 as a research chemist in the Nomex® fiber business in Richmond, VA. In 1982, he moved to the DuPont Fibers Department Pioneering Research Laboratory in Wilmington, DE, where he was a member of an advanced materials research team investigating biopolymers, ceramics, and metal-matrix composites. Jim’s first management position came in 1988 when he moved to Seaford, Del., to assume responsibility for the nylon textile technical group in support of new product development and manufacturing operations. Returning to the Experimental Station in Wilmington in 1993, he was appointed R&D manager for the polymer engineering group in the Central Research Department.   Under Jim’s leadership, a revolutionary new process for polymerization of polyester was invented and developed.   In 1995, he moved to the Lycra® group as the global new product manager and oversaw the renewal of eighty percent of that business’s worldwide product lines.   Returning to Central Research in 1998, Jim was appointed science director for Leveraged Information and Research Services and in 2001 assumed the leadership of Central Research’s Materials Science and Engineering division. Jim’s three-year tenure in Corporate Plans began in 2005, where he oversaw numerous M&A and strategy development projects, ultimately serving as the group’s managing director.

Daniel Weisberg, Chief Executive Officer of TNTP
As TNTP’s Chief Executive Officer, Dan Weisberg oversees TNTP’s executive team and all aspects of the organization’s operations, strategy and growth. Prior to becoming CEO in June 2015 as part of TNTP’s long-term growth strategy, Dan was the Executive Vice President for Performance Management and General Counsel. In this role, he built and led a 130-person team to support the efforts of school systems and states nationwide to recruit, develop and retain effective teachers and principals.

Previously, as Vice President of Policy, Dan helped build TNTP into “a leading voice on teacher quality” and co-authored TNTP’s acclaimed study on the failures of the nation’s teacher evaluation systems, The Widget Effect, which has helped to catalyze evaluation reforms in more than 30 states since 2009. More recently, he participated in the writing of The Irreplaceables (2012), which explored the teacher retention crisis through the experience of the country’s best teachers, and The Mirage (2015), which questions the prevailing assumption that we know how to help teachers improve.

Prior to joining TNTP, Dan served as Chief Executive of Labor Policy and Implementation for the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), the country’s largest public school system. In this role, he led negotiations between the Department and the United Federation of Teachers that resulted in a series of groundbreaking reforms, including the city’s highly regarded “mutual consent” system, which gives teachers and schools the primary voice in school staffing. He also led a team that provided labor support to NYCDOE’s 1,700 principals and implemented a number of high-stakes talent initiatives.

About Keystone Policy Center
Keystone Policy Center brings together crucial teams of stakeholders who have diverse individual perspectives but recognize a common need to address urgent issues with lasting solutions. For more than 40 years, Keystone has helped leaders move beyond fixed positions toward collaborative, action-oriented approaches to problem-solving. In this age of polarized debate on nearly every major topic in public policy, Keystone offers a refreshing yet proven blueprint for progress.