About Healy's Work
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. 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. At SFI, Dr. Hamilton provides strategic direction, scientific rigor, and works to further increase the scale of SFI's conservation impact, in collaboration with SFI’s leadership, staff, and vast network of forest sector organizations, conservation groups, academics, researchers, Indigenous Peoples, educators, and governments agencies.
From 2013-2022, Healy served as Chief Scientist at NatureServe, the worlds first biodiversity information network, where she lead a large team of species and ecosystem scientists in the development and delivery of applied biodiversity science, including the most advanced map of extinction risk yet produced. From 2001-2011, she founded and directed the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences. She has published over 50 research papers on species and ecosystem conservation and global change effects on biodiversity in journals such as Nature, PNAS, Conservation Biology, and Global Change Biology. Healy is an experienced public speaker who is deeply passionate when communicating the value of biodiversity to diverse audiences.
Dr. Hamilton currently 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, and past President of the Society for Conservation GIS. She is a Switzer Foundation Environmental Leadership fellow and a former U.S. Fulbright Scholar.
