About the Speaker
Arturo A. Massol-Deyá is from the mountainous municipality of Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, where his parents founded the community-based organization Casa Pueblo. He grew up within this project and has chaired its Board of Directors since 2007. Casa Pueblo spearheaded efforts to protect the island’s central region and its critical watersheds from an open-pit mining proposal and later from a massive natural gas pipeline. As a result, new forest reserves—El Bosque del Pueblo and Bosque La Olimpia—were established and have since been managed by the community initiative. These actions transformed Puerto Rico’s forestry policy and helped expand protected areas from just 3.7% to the current 17% of the island’s surface. A graduate of Puerto Rico’s public school system (1986) and the University of Puerto Rico (1990), Dr. Massol-Deyá earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1994 and received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Northern Arizona University in 2023. He has served for over 30 years as a faculty member in the Department of Biology at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Following the impact of Hurricane María in 2017, Dr. Massol-Deyá, together with Casa Pueblo, has led a community-driven recovery and energy transition effort aimed at transforming Puerto Rico’s dependence on fossil fuels into a sustainable model powered by renewable energy sources.