Mr. Dan Martin is an experienced manager and grant-maker in nature conservation, education, science and health with broad experience in private foundations, educational institutions and international development.  From February, 2004 until July, 2007, he served as Senior Managing Director of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), a grant-making facility that supports conservation actions in most of the global biodiversity “hotspots.”  CEPF is a partnership among the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, the Government of Japan, the MacArthur Foundation, Agence français de Développement, and Conservation International, which is the managing partner. Dan retired from Conservation International last summer to work as a volunteer on the Obama campaign's environmental policies.

Dr. Martin came to CEPF from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in San Francisco, where he was Senior Director, Environment and Chief Research Officer during the start-up of that major new philanthropy.  He joined Moore in 2001 after serving for 15 years as the founding Director of the World Environment and Resources Program at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago.  He was also the founding Director of MacArthur’s Population and Reproductive Health Program and directed its General Program, which chiefly made grants for mass media and human rights programs, during its formative years.

Dan previously served as President of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in New York and as President of both the Cranbrook Educational Community, a complex of schools and museums in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a consortium of leading liberal arts colleges, based in Chicago.

Earlier, he was Executive Assistant at the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation in New York, making grants in academic medicine, and Assistant to the Chancellor and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.  Martin has also held adjunct teaching positions as Visiting Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and as Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Rush University in Chicago, teaching medical students about health policy.  He served as an Intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and has been active in Republican political campaigns and organizations.

A native of rural Iowa, Dr. Martin received a B.A. in political science at Knox College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in international politics and political theory at Princeton University.  He has served on the boards and advisory committees of numerous American and international non-profit organizations, is a life trustee of Knox College, a member of the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society and the Board of Founders of the Costa Rica-USA Foundation.  Previously, he was a member of the Illinois Board of Regents and the Illinois Board of Higher Education, Vice President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and a member of the Board of Governors of the International Development Research Centre in Canada, among many others.  In Washington, he is a member of St. John’s Episcopal Church and the Cosmos Club.

Dan Martin’s work has taken him to more than 100 countries in most regions of the world, and he is rarely seen without a map, atlas or railroad timetable in hand.