Dr Mark Wright, Chief Scientist

Dr Mark Wright, Chief Scientist

Biography
Mark has had a varied career combining both development and environmental work. He spent eight years overseas in Tanzania, Togo and Belize on behalf of the British government or NGOs working mainly with small-scale farmers. During this time he also obtained his PhD in insect ecology. He joined WWF in 2002, having previously been at Save the Children where he oversaw their southern Africa programmes at a particularly exciting time that saw an end to the civil war in Angola, a regional food security crisis affecting 6 million people, floods in Mozambique, and political upheavals in Zimbabwe.

He is currently Chief Scientist at WWF-UK, where he leads on those issues that cut across all our work programmes. This is to ensure that we are linking appropriately with others in the UK research community and that we live up to our claim of being a 'science-based organisation'. The rationale for this is simply to make sure that, with our finite resources, WWF can deliver the maximum conservation gains with the funds we have available.

In his spare time, he is still very much an outdoors person preferring to spend his free time getting lost in the countryside with his wife and, if he can cajole them enough, his two teenage daughters.