Healy HAMILTON

Dr. Healy Hamilton is Chief Scientist at the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), a forest sustainability organization operating in the U.S. and Canada. She is a biodiversity scientist and global change biologist with graduate degrees from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, and extensive field experience in the tropical forests of Latin America and underwater in coastal oceans around the world. At SFI, Dr. Hamilton works collaboratively to provide strategic direction and increased scientific rigor across the core organizational pillars of Standards, Community, Conservation, and Education. SFI is the world's largest single forest certification standard by area, with over 370 million acres (150 million hectares) of SFI-certified forests, and millions more positively affected by SFI’s Fiber Sourcing Standard. Her goal is to further increase the scale of SFI's conservation impact, working in collaboration with SFI’s leadership, staff, and vast network of forest sector organizations, conservation groups, academics, researchers, Indigenous Peoples, educators, and governments agencies. Through a focus on sustainable forest management and conservation, Dr. Hamilton is addressing urgent contemporary issues such as biodiversity maintenance and recovery, landscape conservation design, climate smart forestry, and the provision of critical ecosystem services to local communities.

Dr. Hamilton has long standing involvement in IUCN. Currently, she serves as an elected member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. National Committee, and a contributor to the Seahorse, Pipefish & Seadragon Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission.  She is a Fellow of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, past President of the Society for Conservation GIS. She is a Switzer Foundation Environmental Leadership fellow and a former U.S. Fulbright Scholar.