Professor Sir Gordon Conway KCMG DL HonFREng FRS

Gordon Conway was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development at the beginning of 2005. He also holds the title of Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London. Prior to that he was President of The Rockefeller Foundation from 1998-2004 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Institute for Development Studies from 1992-1998. 

He was educated at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Cambridge, Trinidad and California (Davis). His discipline is agricultural ecology.  In the early 1960's, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture.  From 1970-1986, he was Professor of Environmental Technology at Imperial College, London.  During this period he lived and worked in many countries in Asia and the Middle East. 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 1988-1992. 

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004. He has honorary degrees from the Universities of Sussex, Brighton, Wales, the West Indies and the Open University and is a Fellow of Imperial College, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Biology and a Fellow of the City and Guilds Institute.He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 2005.  He is Chair of Visiting Arts and a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of East Sussex.