Dr. Daniel Walsh is the Executive Director of CLASS-NY. Dan has been a fixture in environmental protection in NYC for more than 30 years. He has directed environmental quality programs in NYC for New York State Department of Environmental Conservation including the Superfund, Brownfield Cleanup Program, Solid Waste, Hazardous Waste, RCRA and others. He was founding director of the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation and designed and built the NYC Voluntary Cleanup Program, the nation’s first city-run land cleanup program and now one of the largest land cleanup programs in the nation. In these roles, Dan has been responsible for cleanup of thousands of polluted land sites in NYC and has worked on many highly complex remedial projects, such as the cleanup of Fresh Kills, the largest landfill in the world. He has also played a major role in response to numerous environmental crises, including the environmental response to the World Trade disaster and Superstorm Sandy.

As an appointed environmental official in the Mayor’s Office in the Bloomberg and DeBlasio administrations, Dan founded many other environmental programs including the NYC Clean Soil Bank and PURESoil NYC, first-of-their-kind programs to provide sustainable local (circular) recycling of clean soil and clean secondary material resources (compost, etc.) to reduce exposure to pollution in community gardens, expand wetland and dune habitats and improve climate change resilience. Dan is also an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and the Climate School where he devotes his research to the history of pollution in cities and public policy to improve government response to modern-day risks from legacy pollution.