As JRS welcomes the new year, we are excited to start 2016 with two new members of the JRS Board of Trustees: Dr. Sandy Andelman and Dr. Sarah Lynch.
Sandy Andelman is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President for Conservation International. She also is the founding Executive Director of Vital Signs, a monitoring system that fills a critical need for integrative, diagnostic data and indicators on agriculture, ecosystem health and human well-being. Dr. Andelman is pioneering the creation of global public data resources and problem-solving tools to give leaders the systems-level understanding they need to manage the planet sustainably and to promote resilient human societies. She led the design and creation of the TEAM Network, a global system to understand how climate change is affecting tropical forests and the people who depend on them worldwide. She is a World Economic Forum Transformation Leader and previously served as Deputy Director of the U.S. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), one of the world’s top ecological research institutes. Dr. Andelman holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Sarah Lynch is a Director on the World Wildlife Fund’s Sustainable Food Systems Team. An agricultural economist by training, she received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University and Cornell University respectively. Prior to WWF, Dr. Lynch worked as a policy and economic analyst at the USDA Economic Research Service, the Henry A. Wallace Institute of Alternative Agriculture, and a brokerage firm at the Chicago Board of Trade. For three and a half years, she was an advisor to Cameroon’s Ministry of Agriculture working on food security issues.
During her 18 years at WWF, Dr. Lynch has led initiatives to identify and accelerate adoption of more resilient, green, and inclusive approaches to agricultural commodity production systems. These approaches have resulted in the development of a payment for environmental services scheme; a certification program for potatoes grown using bio-intensive production practices; and tools and metrics for measuring and monitoring performance and environmental impacts.