VCU news

By Anne Buckley

Virginia Commonwealth University has placed Jacek Ghosh, M. Arch., in the newly created position of director of sustainability to help guide the state’s largest university in its effort toward climate neutrality.

VCU President Eugene Trani earlier this year signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, an initiative to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80 percent by midcentury to avert the worst impacts of global warming.

Ghosh, 58, will spearhead the development and implementation of a plan that will guide the university toward that goal. A comprehensive inventory of all VCU greenhouse gas emissions is to be completed by May 15, 2009, and the development of an institutional climate action plan is to be completed by the following year.

“It is my hope that sustainability becomes an integral component of the academic, administrative, clinical, operational and research activity VCU engages in every day, Ghosh said. “I would like to see sustainability become ingrained in VCU's DNA as a matter of course.”

Ghosh previously was a visiting community scholar in VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. He also developed a business plan for the establishment of a Sustainable Community Design Center to complement a proposed new graduate program in Sustainable Community Design.

Prior to joining VCU, Ghosh, a native of Canada, spent 30 years in community-based, nonprofit organizations in various cities throughout northeast Canada and the United States.