UWs Shogren to Receive Honorary Doctorate from Swedish University

University of Wyoming economics Professor Jason Shogren will receive an honorary doctorate from Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet (SLU) in Umeå, Sweden, this fall.

Shogren, the Department of Economics chair in the College of Business and the Stroock Chair of Natural Resource Conservation and Management, will receive the honorary degree at SLU (the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) in a ceremony in early October.

As part of the ceremony, Shogren also will present a lecture, titled “Commitment Toward the Public Good.”

Shogren has had a long connection to SLU, which focuses on the forest sciences in Umeå, located in northeast Sweden.

One of his best friends and colleagues, Bengt Kriström, an SLU economics professor, nominated Shogren for the honorary doctorate. They have known each other since the late 1980s when, as a graduate student, Kriström came to the United States to study and met up with Shogren, who was an assistant professor at that time at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

“We have been friends ever since. We have worked together on projects and lectures and dissertation committees for more than three decades,” Shogren says. “I helped SLU and Umeå University pull together a $40 million grant for a proposed Umeå Center for Lands and People. Although the award eventually went to Stockholm, our work together created a foundation for other successful centers that work to integrate economics and the environment.”

Shogren previously spent the year in Umeå when he was the King of Sweden’s professor in 2007, and he met his wife, UW economics Assistant Professor Linda Thunström, in Umeå as well.

“Given that long history, the Department of Forest Economics nominated me this spring for this honorary doctorate. I am honored that SLU agreed,” Shogren says.

He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and served as professor to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Shogren is a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.

Shogren earned a bachelor’s degree (1980) in economics from the University of Minnesota-Duluth and his doctorate (1986) in economics from UW. In 1997, he was the White House senior economist for environmental and natural resource policy, Council of Economic Advisers. He was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, and he served on Wyoming’s Environmental Quality Council from 2000-04. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Aix-Marseille University in France in 2015.