Gordon Conway

Sir Gordon Richard Conway is an agricultural ecologist and former President of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society. He is currently Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa. 

Conway was educated at the Bangor University, Cambridge University and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of California, Davis. In the early 1960s, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture and integrated pest management. From 1970 to 1986, he was Professor of Environmental Technology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. 

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 to 1992. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and Chair of the Institute of Development Studies. Conway now works at Imperial College London and headed the Bill & Melinda Gates-funded project Agriculture for Impact looking into ways to increase and enhance agricultural development for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

It was an independent advocacy initiative, and was based at Imperial College London and was supported through the Agriculture for Impact Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the organization's website, the initiative ran until the summer of 2016. Agriculture for Impact also convened the Montpellier Panel, a group of international experts from the fields of agriculture, trade, policy, ecology and global development. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for East Sussex.