Craig Leisher

Board Member

Craig is a social scientist happiest at the nexus of science and practice. For the last three decades, he has worked in developing countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa on environmental issues. He’s worked at the World Bank in Latin America and the former Soviet Union, UNDP in Vietnam, and WWF-International in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Since 2006, he’s been at the Nature Conservancy working in Asia-Pacific as a policy advisor, as a global social science researcher, and more recently in Africa as the Monitoring and Evaluations Director.

After years of living in countries where women were second-class citizens and several years as a stay-at-home dad, a timely conversation with a colleague at The Nature Conservancy in 2013 led to a joint pledge to champion the integration of gender into conservation work at The Nature Conservancy. In subsequent years, Craig researched and wrote several key studies on gender and conservation, identified and was the first to be trained on a gender, diversity, and inclusion curriculum that’s now organization-wide, served on the steering committee that built The Nature Conservancy’s Women in Nature employee resource group, and helped write the Conservancy’s gender guidance. He has more than 60 science and popular press publications and holds a Master’s in International Relations from the American University and a Bachelor’s in Russian History from the University of New Mexico. Career highlights to date include helping build a sturgeon hatchery on the Kura River in Azerbaijan, measuring the outcomes from two integrated conservation and reproductive health projects in Tanzania, and catalyzing one of the first conservation projects that includes a focus on keeping local girls in secondary school.