Dan Basta

Dan Basta is the Director of the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service.

In his capacity, Dan leads the federal program whose mission is to protect and conserve the unique ecological and cultural marine resources contained in the sanctuary system. He joined the National Ocean Service in 1979, and has applied his training as an environmental engineer to a variety of disciplines, including watershed and land use planning, living marine resource assessment, pollution application control technology, remote sensing and data acquisition processes, and resource economics with systems analysis framework focused on ecosystem based problem solving.

Previously, Dan held positions at Resources for the Future, the Environmental Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and John Hopkins University. He is co-author of more than 60 publications, including textbooks on modeling, atlases of U.S. coastal and ocean regions, as well as reports, books and articles on environmental problems at the national, regional and local levels.  Early in his career, he worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry.

Dan holds a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering from Hofstra University and a master of science degree in engineering and policy sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He is also a NOAA-certified and active diver, and SCUBA instructor with over 20 years of underwater diving and expedition experience around the world.