Strategic Advisors

Eric Dinerstein, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist and Vice President for Science, World Wildlife Fund

Dinerstein has led many of WWF’s most important scientific ventures, including an effort to identify every ecoregion on the planet and define the most biologically important, a framework called the Global 200 that now guides WWF’s fieldwork in more than 100 countries. From tracking tigers and rhinos in Nepal and snow leopards in northern India, to catching and studying fruit bats in Costa Rica, Dinerstein has championed the idea of protecting wildlife beyond park boundaries. Considered groundbreaking at the time, this approach is now standard practice for large-mammal conservation. Eric also is an ardent advocate of forming partnerships with local communities to ensure their support in protecting biodiversity.

Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D.
President, Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University

Ehrlich is a pioneering entomologist and author who is most widely recognized for his work in alerting the public to the perils of overpopulation. At Stanford University, he has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics and genetics of natural butterfly populations, and is co-founder with Peter Raven of the field of co-evolution. Ehrlich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. His many awards include a MacArthur Prize, the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (given in lieu of a Nobel Prize in areas where the Nobel is not given), the United Nations’ Sasakawa Environment Prize, and the Blue Planet Prize.

Marc Feldman, Ph.D.
Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University

Feldman’s work on human genetic variation and its relationship to continental ancestry has received wide recognition. He has written more than 335 scientific papers and four books on evolution, ecology, and mathematical biology. Feldman uses applied mathematics and computer modeling to simulate and analyze the process of evolution. He helped develop the quantitative theory of cultural evolution, which he applies to issues in human behavior, and also the theory of niche construction, which has wide applications in ecology and evolutionary analysis. In China, he supervises a large research program on demographic issues related to the gender ratio, and at Stanford, he directs the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies.

Lawrence Goulder, Ph.D.
Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, Stanford University

Goulder is the Shuzo Nishihara Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics at Stanford. He is also a Senior Fellow at SIEPR and Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a University Fellow of Resources for the Future. Goulder’s research examines the environmental and economic impacts of U.S. and international environmental policies, including policies to deal with climate change and pollution from power plants and automobiles. His work also explores the “sustainability” of consumption patterns in many different countries. He graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in philosophy, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford.

Ginette Hemley, Ph.D.
Chief Conservation Officer, World Wildlife Fund

Hemley oversees WWF’s conservation programs, leading broad conservation initiatives at a national and international scale. Through the execution of strategies that link local field-based conservation efforts with global market, policy and partnership initiatives, Hemley helps advance the organization’s work in 19 priority places around the world. Hemley previously served as WWF’s Managing Vice President for Conservation Programs, as Vice President for Species Conservation, and directed WWF’s international wildlife policy program and wildlife trade program, TRAFFIC. A biologist with over 20 years of international conservation experience, she received a BS in biology from the College of William and Mary, studied history and philosophy at Oxford University, and is an ELIAS Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jeffrey Koseff, Ph.D.
Director, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

At Stanford, Koseff has been instrumental in developing the vision for the interdisciplinary work on environmental issues. Long-term research projects under his supervision include attempts to understand the transport of mass and energy in estuarine systems such as San Francisco Bay, and the functioning of coral reef systems of the Red Sea and Hawaii and the kelp forest systems of California. Prior to coming to Stanford as a graduate student in 1977, Koseff worked as a consulting engineer in South Africa, where he was born and educated initially.

Nicholas Lapham
Senior Fellow, World Wildlife Fund

Lapham specializes in U.S. and international conservation policy with an emphasis on Africa. He served as president of African Parks Foundation of America, an organization that supports public/private partnerships to improve management of Africa’s protected areas. He was vice president for policy at Conservation International (CI) and director of CI’s Center for Conservation and Government, where he helped catalyze the International Conservation Caucus, a bipartisan forum of U.S. legislators dedicated to increasing U.S. global conservation leadership. Lapham was a senior program officer at the United Nations Foundation and also served as a senior adviser to the White House Climate Change Task Force in the Clinton administration.

Pamela Matson, Ph.D.
Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University

Matson is an international leader in efforts to harness science and technology for sustainable development, serving as a member of the National Academies Board on Sustainable Development and as the founding chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability. Her research interests include ecological and biogeochemical responses to agricultural intensification, climate change, nitrogen deposition, and the impact of policy decisions on developing region’s environments. At Stanford, she is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, in addition to her post as Dean of the School of Earth Sciences. Her honors include a MacArthur Prize and being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Hal Mooney, Ph.D.
Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University

Mooney has been an international leader in efforts to solve problems related to biodiversity and global warming, serving as a panel co-chair of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and organizing networks of ecologists and other scientists. His expertise ranges from measuring the adaptations of individual plants to charting the processes of ecosystems and showing how human-induced ecological disturbances modify the functioning of the earth as a whole. Research in his laboratory focuses on the study of the impact of enhanced carbon dioxide on ecosystem structure and function.

Melissa Moye
Director, Conservation Finance, World Wildlife Fund

Moye develops sustainable financing and payment for ecosystem service strategies for WWF’s field programs. Since joining WWF as a Senior Fellow in 2001, she has helped create comprehensive sustainable financing programs in the Congo Basin and Madagascar. She is currently working on new programs in coastal East Africa and the Arctic and contributes to WWF’s work on carbon finance and marine tourism. With over 20 years experience in developing countries, Moye served as an advisor to the World Bank, USAID, UNDP, and Debt Relief International, focusing on debt management and conservation finance. She has a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Walter Reid, Ph.D.
Director of the Conservation and Science Program, Packard Foundation

Reid was responsible for the creation of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which he directed from 1998 until the release of the findings in March 2005. In recent years, he has also been a Consulting Professor with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, coordinator of the Puget Sound Salmon Collaboration, a group of Washington State environmental and business leaders that recommended actions to help recover threatened salmon species, and Vice President of the World Resources Institute in Washington D.C. He has published 87 papers and five books.

Kirsten Schuyt, Ph.D.
Head Global Programmes and Policy, WWF-Netherlands

Schuyt is one of the founders and steering committee members of a joint WWF-CARE-IIED Payments for Environmental Services (PES) program, which is active in Peru, Guatemala, Tanzania, Indonesia and Philippines. Schuyt’s work has focused on determining the economic values of water and forests and developing sustainable financing mechanisms for conservation. She now heads the global programs and policy unit of WWF Netherlands. Schuyt has a Master’s Degree in International Economics from the University of Maastricht and a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.