Jane Chalmers

Jane retired in 2011 as deputy general counsel to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where she spent nine years as the senior career lawyer to the 12,000-employee agency. Her areas of particular focus were the development, implementation, and defense of regulations to ensure the sustainability of U.S. marine fisheries, the establishment of marine protected areas (particularly in the Western Pacific Ocean), and developing and implementing measures to protect the highly endangered North Atlantic right whales. From 1981 until 2002, Jane worked at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government agency that sells political risk insurance and provides financing to U.S. companies investing in sustainable projects in the developing world. She was the deputy general counsel there for 15 years, overseeing all legal services supporting agency operations, including project finance and political risk insurance for projects worldwide; determining the validity of political risk insurance claims and obtaining salvage from foreign governments on paid claims; negotiating international agreements necessary for OPIC operations in each country where it operates; and developing and implementing legislation authorizing agency operations. Before joining OPIC, Jane worked as an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington and Burling (1977 to 1981) and at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, law firm of O’Brien, Moran and Dimond. She began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge James P. Harvey (1974) and Judge James Churchill (1975 to 1976), both of the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit. She is a graduate of Harvard University (BA, 1971) and the University of Michigan Law School (JD, 1974). Since retiring in 2011, Jane obtained a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language from the LADO Institute in Washington, D.C., and volunteers as an English language and literacy tutor. In 2014, she and her husband, journalist Frank Greve, spent six months traveling slowly around the world, discovering the wonder of many backwaters along the way. Jane and Frank are active members of Bethesda Friends Meeting. They have two grown children who were both SFS lifers—Katherine Heller ’98 and Nathaniel Heller ’94.