Professor Melissa Leach FBA

Anthropology, geography; global development and social change; issues of inequality, gender, environmental sustainability, health and infectious disease in Africa and beyond; interfaces between social science, science and policy
Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2017

Summary

Melissa Leach is the Executive Director of Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) and Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. She co-founded and co-directed the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre from 2006 to 2014, with its pioneering pathways approach to innovation, sustainability and development issues.

She was lead author of UN Women’s World Survey on the Role of Women in Economic Development 2014, and of the World Social Science Report 2016 on 'Challenging Inequalities'. She co-founded the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform and was lead social scientist in the UK and WHO Ebola scientific advisory committees during 2014-15.

Professor Leach is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-food), the Strategic Coherence of ODA Research (SCOR) Board, the ESRC International Development Advisory Group (EIDEG) and the MRC Global Health Group.

Current post

Cambridge Conservation Initiative Executive Director

Director, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

Past appointments

Science Committee of Future Earth Vice-chair

2012 - 2017

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor Penny Harvey FBA

Anthropology of state effects, infrastructures, engineering, materiality and communicative practice drawing on long term ethnographic research in Peru and more recently in the UK. Current focus on nuclear waste disposal, emergent publics and the politics and temporalities of place-making

Headshot of Penny Harvey FBA

Professor Daniel Miller FBA

Anthropology of Social Media and Digital Anthropology. Anthropological approaches to material culture including clothing and homes; the role of objects in relationships; the process of consumption and the study of commerce and value

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