Professor Melissa Leach FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2017
- Sections
- Anthropology and Geography
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 William Cronon FBA
Environmental history and historical geography, focusing principally on human interactions with the landscapes and ecosystems of North America
Professor Georgina Born OBE FBA
Anthropology and sociology of music, media and digital cultures; anthropological theory; the social, the material, and time; cultural production, cultural institutions and creative industries; music in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries; interdisciplinarity; AI and culture; digital humanities and digital methods
Professor Robert J. Mayhew FBA
The interface of historical geography and intellectual history, in particular the intellectual history of British geography books, demography and migration, c 1660-1900
