Interim Executive Director
Dr. Ahmed Rachid (AR) El-Khattabi is the Interim Executive Director of the Environmental Finance Center (EFC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His background is in applied economics and urban planning. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. El-Khattabi’s expertise is in policy-oriented quantitative research and data management. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of economic development and environmental planning with a particular focus on urban water management. Prior to joining the EFC, he was an ORISE Postdoctoral Fellow and then an Economist in the Water Economics Center at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water. At the EPA, he co-developed an environmental justice batch screening tool (EJSCREENbatch), contributed to the development of support tools for regulatory benefits analyses, and conducted research to support national rulemaking related to Waters of the United States.