John Sessions, University Distinguished Professor of Forestry and Strachan Chair of Forest Operations Management at Oregon State University, is leading efforts on feedstock logistics for the NARA project.
Sessions has significant experience planning and running large-scale timber operations. He was harvest manager of the world’s largest tropical forestry plantation in the Amazon rain forest of Brazil, which produced 5000 tons of logs daily including feedstock for a 55 MW turbine.
His research has focused on a wide range of planning and operational problems including searching for optimal forest land allocations, management regimes, log making, transportation networks and all aspects of the forestry supply chain. He has three times co-chaired national assessments of forests and forest management practices on tribal forests and participated on several other congressional assessments. He served as one of two academic members of the Interagency Science Team for the Multi-agency Fire Program. He has consulted in 16 countries for NGOs, companies, and agencies to solve forest planning and transportation problems.
Since 1983, he has taught courses in forest planning, transportation planning, and combinatorial optimization at Oregon State University. He holds a Ph.D. in forest management from OSU and is a registered professional engineer.