Mr. Flaim received his PhD from Cornell University in 1978 in Resource Economics with concentrations in petroleum industry finance, quantitative methods and tax law. During his twenty-five year career supervising and managing economic, engineering and environmental assessments of the energy industries, Dr. Flaim was employed by and consulted for numerous investment banking houses, attorneys, oil and gas production companies, gas and electric utilities, national laboratories operated by the US Department of Energy, and the International Energy Agency-Paris. Dr. Flaim has served as an expert witness in US Federal District Courts throughout the country and the US Supreme Court.

Dr. Flaim has conducted oil and gas prospect evaluations throughout the Western US, and has managed large-scale economic and engineering feasibility analyses of renewable energy systems, hydropower, coal, and nuclear power resources, specializing in the development of quantitative methods to assess the environmental consequences of natural resource development. Dr. Flaim is the author of more than 100 reports and private client studies and his research has been published in the peer-reviewed journals, Land Economics, Resources and Energy, Impact Assessment, and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. After returning from Paris in 1995, where Dr. Flaim led international, multi-disciplinary assessments of energy development and energy consumption on transboundary pollution, air quality, and global climate change issues, Dr. Flaim founded and presently manages, Cognitive Data Systems, a computer data graphics boutique that provides data animation and data visualization services to the energy industries.