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DR. ANTHONY MICHAELS (TONY) is co-Founder and a Managing Director of Proteus Environmental Technologies, LLC (Proteus). Proteus manages a private equity fund, Proteus Environmental Technologies Fund, LP. It has a unique strategy to promote environmental research and innovation in universities and to help commercialize transformative discoveries that are market solutions to major environmental problems in large potential markets. Proteus creates and manages a balanced portfolio of companies with technologies in a wide diversity of environmental areas including waste treatment, green energy and fuels, sustainable seafood and clean water.
Dr. Michaels was born in San Diego, California and divided his undergraduate education between the University of California, San Diego and the University of Arizona. He did his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he conducted research on how the oceans affect greenhouse gases.
After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he moved to the Bermuda Biological Station for Research to develop an ocean time-series program. This program developed into a premier site for the study of ocean biogeochemistry and greenhouse gases. In 1993, as the catastrophe reinsurance industry in Bermuda began to expand, Dr. Michaels and Dr. Anthony Knap created a program called the Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI), a partnership between science and business. The RPI helped create new mechanisms for insuring against the catastrophic losses from hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
In 1996, Dr. Michaels became the first Director of the new University of Southern California Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. The Wrigley Institute is involved in a wide variety of marine and environmental science research and education as well as efforts to make that research relevant, usable and understandable to decision makers. The Wrigley Institute promotes research that spans the range from genes to global change and brings together biology, earth science, economics, policy, business, medicine and engineering. The Wrigley Institute interacts broadly with stakeholders and companies in such areas as carbon sequestration, fisheries, coastal water quality, conservation, human health and aquaculture. Dr. Michaels is also passionate about broadening environment education and promoted a “K-to-gray” education philosophy, that reaches students of all ages.
Dr. Michaels has been President of the National Association of Marine Labs (2006 - 2007), an organization that represents 120 ocean, coastal and Great Lakes laboratories. He was a founding member and the first President of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, now with a membership of 140 colleges and universities. He helped found the Consortium for Ocean Leadership with a membership of over 90 ocean institutions. He is a member of the governing boards of the Catalina Island Conservancy, the Southern California Marine Institute and the National Council for Science and the Environment. He has chaired the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education.
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