John Cusak is President of Gifford Park Associates (GPA), a management consulting firm specializing in helping investors, major companies and academic institutions understand the relationships between organizational sustainability performance and the bottom line financial performance & shareholder/stakeholder value of organizations, and profiting from those relationships.
Clients have included multinational companies, utilities, institutional investors, government agencies, academic institutions, venture capital firms, and a number of companies operating in the areas of carbon finance, clean technology and climate risk management. His most well-known GPA assignment was serving as the start-up CEO of Innovest, the corporate sustainability performance rating agency and investment research house, from 1998 to 2001.
Prior to starting GPA in 1993, he was a senior executive at Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), where he was head of several subsidiaries in the US and Europe, held technology marketing and R&D staff positions, and worked extensively with venture capital firms managing ABB's energy & environmental technologies venture fund. He has a MBA from NYU Stern School, and an MCE in Environmental Engineering & Science and a BCE in Civil Engineering from Manhattan College. His largest client role presently is serving as part-time Executive Director of the New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS), a consortium of 45+ colleges and universities working to integrate sustainability into their campus operations, curricula, research and communities. In addition, he is an adjunct finance professor at the Iona College Hagan School of Business in New Rochelle NY, teaching a course in Sustainable Finance for the past four years.
