Gordon Conway


Sir Gordon Richard Conway is an agricultural ecologist and former President of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society. He is currently Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa.

Education

Conway was educated at the Bangor University, Cambridge University and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of California, Davis.

Career

In the early 1960s, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture and integrated pest management. From 1970 to 1986, he was Professor of Environmental Technology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. He then directed the sustainable agriculture program of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London before becoming Representative of the Ford Foundation in New Delhi from 1988 to 1992. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Institute of Development Studies.
He was elected the eleventh President of The Rockefeller Foundation in April 1998, a position he held until 2004. From 2004 to 2009 he was also President of the Royal Geographical Society. He took up his appointment as the UK Department for International Development's Chief Scientific Adviser in January 2005, serving until 2009.
Conway now works at Imperial College London and heads the Bill & Melinda Gates funded project Agriculture for Impact looking into ways to increase and enhance agricultural development for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for East Sussex.

Honours and awards

He has authored:
He co-authored: