Lisa Micheli, Ph.D.

Dr. Micheli joined Sonoma County’s Pepperwood Foundation in October of 2009 as its inaugural Executive Director and now serves as the organization’s President and CEO. She brings more than 30 years of experience applying her technical, policy, and fundraising expertise to the design and implementation of ecological restoration, research, and education programs. She started her career at the US Environmental Protection Agency and then completed her graduate studies at UC Berkeley as a NASA Earth Systems Research Fellow in 2000. She now focuses her research on relationships between climate, watershed health, wildfire, and biodiversity, and has published numerous peer-reviewed studies.

Dr. Micheli specializes in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations focused on using relevant research to craft collective solutions to today’s most pressing landscape conservation challenges. She serves as the co-chair of Pepperwood’s Terrestrial Biodiversity Climate Change Collaborative (TBC3) with Dr. David Ackerly, Dean of UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources. She has been recognized as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, a Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation Environmental Leader, a Bay Nature Local Hero, a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, and a 2020 Global Fulbright Fellow. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the Society for Conservation Biology.