About the Assistant Administrator of EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
David Uhlmann
David M. Uhlmann is the Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA). He previously served from September 2022 to July 2023 as Senior Advisor to the EPA Administrator and as Deputy Assistant Administrator for OECA.
Before joining EPA, Uhlmann was the Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice and the inaugural Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School from 2007 to 2022. During that time, Uhlmann also served as the Counselor to the Independent Monitor and Auditor appointed by the Justice Department and EPA after the Volkswagen diesel scandal. His research and advocacy interests include criminal and civil enforcement of the environmental laws, corporate accountability, and climate change and sustainability.
Uhlmann served from 1990 to 2007 at the U.S. Department of Justice, the last seven years as chief of the Environmental Crimes Section, where he was the top environmental crimes prosecutor in the country. He led an office of approximately 40 prosecutors responsible for the prosecution of environmental and wildlife crimes nationwide and chaired the Justice Department's Environmental Crimes Policy Committee. His work as lead prosecutor in United States v. Elias, a knowing endangerment case that left a 20-year-old worker severely and permanently brain-damaged, is chronicled in The Cyanide Canary. He received numerous Justice Department and EPA awards for his precedent-setting prosecutions, including the first environmental justice criminal trial.
Uhlmann is a fellow in the American College of Environmental Lawyers and was named a “Conservation Hero” by the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. in history and political science with high honors from Swarthmore College. Following law school, he clerked for United States District Court Judge Marvin H. Shoob in Atlanta, Georgia.
Uhlmann is married to Virginia Murphy, a professor in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. They have three adult children and two grandchildren, all of whom love the beaches of Lake Michigan and hiking in the northern Maine woods.