Jay Beeks

Professor Jay Cooper Beeks is a lifelong learner with extensive management experience in positions requiring sustainable leadership. Jay completed his Ph.D. in transformative studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies. This TSD program is in the social sciences with an emphasis on leadership and sustainability. Jay’s dissertation was on alternative economics, exploring fourteen alternatives to our present system of capitalism. Specifically, how these alternative systems may be integrated into or completely replace capitalism for the benefit of society, natural ecological systems and to address the problems of global climate change. Prior to this Ph.D., Jay completed a sustainability MBA from Marylhurst University, an MS in environmental science from the Oregon Graduate Institute, an MS in civil engineering from Portland State University and a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona.

Most of Jay's career, however, has been working, along with raising two kids and being happily involved in all of the many activities that go along with being a husband and caring for his family. His management experience is with electric utilities, the State of Oregon and for private consulting firms. He has extensive engineering management experience in coal, oil, and nuclear generating facilities design and operations working for both Southern California Edison and Portland General Electric. Jay's consulting experience has been as a science and engineering manager on a wide range of projects including wind farms, dam deconstruction, earthen dam design/construction and a multiple of transportation projects.

Jay's focus now is as a full-time instructor at Arizona State University for the MSL program, and the SOS program for undergraduate studies in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.  His past teaching experience includes a multiple of courses at Marylhurst University for the Sustainable MBA program, the University of Denver for the Masters in Environmental Policy Management program, Franklin Pierce University for the Energy and Sustainability program and at Saint Francis University for the Sustainability MBA program. A few of these courses include emerging sustainable leadership, sustainable transportation, alternative & renewable energies, integrated environmental systems, global energy, business modeling and decision making, industrial hygiene, site evaluation and remediation, impacts of recreational use, principles of sustainability, environmental values & ethics, leadership for environmental managers, sustainable energy technology & systems, equity - justice & sustainability, energy policy, introduction to applied math for the life and social sciences, sustainable world, and basic energy science.