Will Travis,who is called Travis or Trav, holds Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Regional Planning degrees from Penn State University. From 1970 to 1972 he served as BCDC’s first Bay Development Design Analyst. He then spent 12 years with the California Coastal Commission where he held a number of positions, including heading the agency’s offshore oil drilling permit staff, directing its public access program, and overseeing its budget and administrative functions. He returned to BCDC in 1985 as Deputy Director. He was appointed Executive Director in 1995.

In addition to his professional experience working for California’s coastal management agencies, he has also worked in the fields of architecture, local planning, private consulting, advertising and public relations. He has written many articles on coastal issues, has provided advice on coastal matters to other states and nations, and has been a lecturer at universities throughout North America. He was chairman of the Shell Oil Spill Litigation Settlement Trustee Committee which, administered a multimillion dollar settlement fund set up to settle claims resulting from a 1988 oil spill. In that capacity, he spearheaded the public acquisition of 10,000 acres of privately owned salt ponds along the northern shoreline of San Francisco Bay to be used for one of the largest coastal wetland restoration projects in California’s history.

He is a member of the National Research Council Roundtable on Climate Change Education and serves on the board of trustees of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, the board of directors of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), the executive management committee of a Joint Policy Committee of four regional agencies, and the community advisory board of KB Home Corporation. He is a member of Lambda Alpha, the honorary society for the advancement of land economics, and he has also chaired a special committee established by the City of Berkeley to work with the University of California to develop a new plan for downtown Berkeley. He served on the project team of “Saving the Bay,” a public television documentary film, the editorial board of the newsletter Estuary, the board of directors of Friends of the Estuary, the steering committee of the Bay Area Transportation Choices Forum, and the board of directors of the Forum for the Future of San Francisco Bay. He was an advisor for the National Ocean Service’s San Francisco Bay Project and a member of the Berkeley Planning Commission.

With 240 square miles of low-lying filled land along the Bay shoreline, he has become a leading advocate for a regional strategy to address climate change and sea level rise in the Bay Area. He is the 2009 recipient of the Jean Auer Environmental Award, and he and his wife, Jody Loeffler, are the authors of “Katherine’s Gift,” a memoir on international adoption.