Martha Crawford Heitzmann

Martha Crawford Heitzmann (born September 30, 1967) is head of research and innovation on the managing board of Areva, the French state-owned nuclear power conglomerate. One of a very few Americans in the upper ranks of French business,^{[citation needed]} she has a professional background in environmental policy and engineering.^[1] A dual national (US and French) based in Paris, she joined Areva in March 2011 after three years as vice president for group research and development at Air Liquide, one of the top 40 private-sector companies in France.^[2] There she was responsible for setting strategic direction and leading Air Liquide’s R&D activities worldwide.^[3]

Born Martha Crawford in Tucson, Arizona, she grew up on a ranch north of Tucson and attended University High School, a public school for the academically gifted and talented.^[4] She studied ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson on an Arizona Board of Regents academic scholarship and a fellowship from the E. Blois du Bois Foundation of Phoenix, Arizona. After graduating in 1989 she worked as an environmental policy intern in the office of Senator Al Gore in Washington, D.C., then as adviser to the head of the Environmental Protection Authority in the republic of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia. She returned to the United States in 1992 to pursue her master’s degree and PhD in environmental engineering at Harvard University (with master’s coursework and PhD supervision in chemical engineering based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). She was awarded the PhD in 1996, shortly after marrying Pierre Heitzmann, a Frenchman studying law in the United States. They moved in 1997 to Paris, where Martha received her Master of Business Administration degree from the Collège des Ingénieurs.

She was named vice president of research and development for Air Liquide in 2007 after holding positions at Suez S.A. and, from 1999, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where she was an analyst and later principal administrator in the OECD Environment Directorate’s program of environmental performance reviews of member and non-member countries, leading multinational teams of experts in evaluating how countries measured up to their own environmental commitments as defined in domestic legislation and international agreements.^[5]

At Air Liquide she led the group’s worldwide R&D activities at its eight main centers in Europe, North America and Asia, and administered an innovation budget of over €230 million a year in areas including energy efficiency and industrial process optimization; renewable energy forms such as solar photovoltaics technology, biofuel and hydrogen fuel; and carbon capture and storage.^[6] A frequent public speaker in France, the United States and Germany, she also contributes in several countries to work on strategy to improve public-private cooperation for R&D. She is active in international women’s networks and, in a country where a 2010 survey of major companies showed that women made up only 37% of the workforce and no women were CEOs,^[7] is one of relatively few women executives (and only a handful of Americans) at her level.

Heitzmann serves on the boards of two corporations (SEPPIC Chemicals and Air Liquide Santé France, the group’s medical gases and chemicals producers), a number of scientific organizations, including the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France’s premier public research agency), and several other for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

Selected works

In addition to being lead author on 16 country volumes in the OECD Environmental Performance Review series, Heitzmann has written or co-written, among other publications:

Crawford, M., Holthus, P. et al. (1992) Vulnerability Assessment to Accelerated Sea Level Rise: Case Study of Majuro Atoll. US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and South Pacific Regional Environment Program.

Crawford, M. J. (1992) Republic of the Marshall Islands National Environmental Management Strategy, Parts A & B. Developed with RMI National Taskforce on Environmental Management and Sustainable Development. Asian Development Bank.

Crawford, M. (1993) Sustainable Development in the Pacific Island Nations. Environmental Science and Technology 27(12): 2286-2290.

Crawford, M. and Wilson, R. (1996) Low-Dose Linearity: The Rule of the Exception? Human and Ecological Risk Assessment International 2(2): 305-330.

References

1. ^ [1] Martha Heitzmann, une franco- américaine à la R et D d'Air liquide.
2. ^ [2], Fortune Global 500, Countries: France.
3. ^ [3], Martha Heitzmann appointed Vice President of Research & Development.
4. ^ [4] Tucson Unified School District, University High School Mission Statement.
5. ^ [5] OECD, Environmental Country Reviews.
6. ^ [6], Air Liquide, 2009 Sustainable Development Report.
7. ^ [7] World Economic Forum, The Corporate Gender Gap Report 2010.

Persondata
Name	Heitzmann, Martha Crawford
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 30, 1967
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death