Teresa Pohlman
Executive Director, Sustainability and Environmental Programs at Headquarters, Department of Homeland Security
Dr. Teresa R. Pohlman has over 25 years of extensive leadership experience managing all aspects of public and private sector environmental and infrastructure program and product development. Her background includes management positions with responsibility for $300 million to over $1 billion annual budgets for environmental, infrastructure, and facility maintenance programs.
At Headquarters Air Force, she was the Environmental Division Chief, and managed the Air Force’s $1 Billion environmental program, including cleanup, compliance, conservation, and pollution prevention, for all bases in the United States and overseas, including international bilateral agreements with Russia, Norway, Argentina, and Italy. She also served as an Air Force Regional Program Manager with the Air Force Base Conversion Agency, for a $300 million program concerned with base closure and disposal issues, closing five Air Force bases. While working for the Navy, she served at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Headquarters as the Navy single point of contact for environmental base closure issues, She also worked at the Naval Coastal Systems Center in Panama City, Florida as the Project Manager for the Chemical Warfare Protective Dive Suit.
As the Tenant Activities Group Leader at the Pentagon Renovation Office (PRO), she was responsible for the strategic master planning for the entire Pentagon Renovation, other facilities on the Pentagon Reservation, and other geographically dispersed sites for alternate operations. She ensured that the strategic design and requirements for these projects were consistent across the Department of Defense, among the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and the other Defense agencies. These requirements integrated operations and maintenance considerations during construction, via the Design Process, where multiple stakeholders participated to ensure renovation and construction are accomplished without sacrificing mission continuity. In addition, she managed the safety and occupational health program for all projects in the Pentagon Renovation Office’s $3 billion program, including both renovation and new construction. She was also responsible for coordinating the overall implementation strategy to incorporate appropriate force protection projects, added to the Pentagon Renovation Program as a result of the September attacks, into the $1billion Pentagon renovation efforts. For their outstanding efforts in sustainable construction, her Team won the Presidential Award for Leadership in Federal Energy Management, one of five awarded in the federal government. In addition, she spearheaded the efforts for LEED certification of three Pentagon Renovation projects, the Metro Entrance Facility, the Pentagon Athletic Center, and the Remote Delivery Facility.
Prior to the Department of Defense, she worked for several defense contractors, and wrote Program Management Plans, Operational Specifications, and Quality Assurance Plans for research and development projects. She also performed and directed power spectral density, 2 moment of inertia, and stress analysis of a large Navy ship cargo transfer crane, and analyzed an inertial navigation system for shock and vibration effects. While working at Rockwell International and NASA, she managed and executed the installation and test of Orbiter Experiments on the Space Shuttle, for the first three flights of the Columbia.
Currently, Dr. Pohlman is the Executive Director, Sustainability and Environmental Programs at Headquarters, Department of Homeland Security.