David Yoskowitz, Ph.D., serves as the Executive Director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), a position he has held since November 14, 2022.
At TPWD, he is responsible for overseeing an agency of 3,300 professionals in 13 different divisions, including Wildlife, Law Enforcement, State Parks, Coastal Fisheries, and Inland Fisheries. Yoskowitz has been actively engaged in the areas of private lands conservation, the acquisition of additional state parkland and wildlife management areas, securing state funding for state parks, children in nature initiatives, coastal conservation and mitigation initiatives stemming from the Deepwater Horizon incident, and the state's management response to chronic wasting disease.
Prior to joining TPWD, Yoskowitz was the Senior Executive Director of the Harte Research Institute (HRI) for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, where he was also HRI's founding Endowed Chair for Socioeconomics and held positions in both faculty and administration over the past 20 years.
Yoskowitz also held the position of Chief Economist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (2014-2015), where he co-chaired an interagency task force under the auspices of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that developed a research agenda around coastal green infrastructure and ecosystem services. Working with the NOAA Social Science Committee, he helped develop the agency's first Social Science Vision and Strategy.