USAID Official to Address Duquesne Graduates at MBA Sustainability Diploma Ceremony
Duquesne alumnus John Patrick (J.P.) Gibbons (MBA ’12) will be the keynote speaker at Duquesne’s Class of 2016 MBA Sustainability diploma ceremony, to be held on Friday, July 29, in the Power Center Ballroom.
Gibbons currently serves as senior investment officer for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the lead federal agency that works to end extreme global poverty and to enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.
“We chose J.P. Gibbons to be our keynote speaker because he, along with other leaders in Washington, are pushing the performance frontier of social and environmental sustainability efforts around the world,” said Dr. Robert Sroufe, Murrin Chair of Global Competitiveness in the John F. Donahue Graduate School of Business. “As a senior investment officer at USAID, J.P. is a catalyst for new initiatives and informs policy decisions. He understands global sustainability issues, performance measurement and how to create change.”
In his role within USAID’s Strategic Transactions Group, Gibbons unlocks needed financing in the environmental and conservation sectors through the structuring of credit guarantees and other innovative products to help tackle development problems.
Prior to joining USAID, Gibbons worked as a small business advisor with the Peace Corps in Guatemala, and as an analyst with a boutique financial consulting firm. He is the recipient of a 2015 Kinship Conservation Fellowship, a program that trains experienced conservationists in the use of market-based principles to address environmental challenges. Gibbons received a bachelor of business administration degree in finance and business economics from the University of Notre Dame, and earned his MBA Sustainability from Duquesne.
Duquesne’s MBA Sustainability program has been ranked fourth in the United States and 10th in the world for integrating sustainability into curriculum by Corporate Knights, a quarterly international publication focused on social, economic and ecological benefits and costs.
Fourteen MBA Sustainability students will receive their diplomas this week, after finishing a comprehensive academic program with the overarching theme of Strategic Sustainable Development. During their studies, the students completed eight consulting projects that helped to define business strategies at local companies and organizations including Quasar, Parkhurst, Green Building Alliance, Phipps Conservatory and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.
The cohort group gained valuable work experience through these consultancy projects, which included evaluating the viability of potential partners and markets to pilot new clean energy technology, assessing economic potential of reclaiming abandoned mine lands to attract new industries, and analyzing the feasibility of broad-scale conversion of bio-waste to energy in western Pennsylvania.
While abroad, this year’s cohort group attended classes at the ICN Business School in Nancy, France, and later traveled to Germany, where they collaborated with Cisco and SAP on emerging technologies and served as corporate social responsibility consultants for Merck.