Mark D. Myers

From dKosopedia

Category: US officials

Mark D. Myers is the Director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). He was confirmed as Director on September 15, 2006.

Myers has lived in Alaska for more than twenty years, and he is the former Director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, and a past President of the Alaska Geological Survey. Myers supports oil drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

He showed political courage in October 2005, when he resigned as the head of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas. Former Governor Frank Murkowski had fired Tom Irwin, the Commissioner of Natural Resources, after Irwin criticized a proposed contract for a natural gas pipeline because it was too favorable to the energy companies. In his resignation letter, Myers said "I cannot continue as Director and watch silently as the state's interests are undermined ..."

Nevertheless, one of Myers first acts as director of the USGS was to impose strict censorship restrictions on scientists, preventing them from publishing papers or giving interviews without the approval of the public relations department.

Myers has BS and MS degrees in geology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a PhD in geology from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve from 1977 to 2003, retiring as a Lt. Colonel.

Related Articles

• Republican War on Science

External Links

• USGS biography
• Geotimes magazine profile, Nov. 2006.