Eleanor Sterling, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History
Eleanor J. Sterling is the Director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC). Dr. Sterling has 25 years of field research experience in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where she has conducted behavioral, ecological, and genetic studies of both terrestrial and aquatic species. Her recent work has focused on the biodiversity and history of land use in Vietnam, research that led to the publication of Vietnam: A Natural History in 2006. She is also the Chair of the Palmyra Atoll Research Consortium and is helping document biodiversity on this remote atoll in the central Pacific Ocean 700 miles from Hawaii. In 2000, Dr. Sterling spearheaded the establishment of the CBC’s Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners, which develops and implements educational resources to help teach biodiversity conservation to educators and students around the world. Since 1997, she has also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she is Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology. Dr. Sterling received her B.A. in psychology from Yale College in 1983 and her M. Phil. and Ph.D. in Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale University in 1993. She joined the CBC in 1996 as Program Director and was named the Director of the Center in 2000.
