Julia Marton-Lefèvre (1946, Budapest) is a French - US environmentalist and academic. She studied history, ecology and environmental planning in the US and in France, and was born in Hungary. Career She was Director General of IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, from 2007 to mid January 2015. Prior to this, Marton-Lefèvre was Rector of the University for Peace (UPEACE), a graduate-level international university, mandated by the United Nations, providing education, training and research on issues related to peace and conflict. Earlier offices held by Marton-Lefèvre include Executive Director of LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) International , a programme established by The Rockefeller Foundation to bring together and train mid-career leaders from all parts of the world in improving their leadership skills around the issues of sustainable development, and Executive Director of the International Council for Science (then known as ICSU). She began her international career in a programme on environmental education at UNESCO. Institutional affiliations At present, Marton-Lefèvre is focusing on using her broad experience to advise organizations to help them achieve their goals. She chairs several international groups: the Executive Committee of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Donor Council of the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund, the Board of Trustees of the recently merged CGIAR Centers: the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture) and the Strategy Advisory Council to the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI). In 2019 she was elected to be a member of the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) . Her links with academic institutions are with Yale University, where she spent 2016 as the Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Environmental Scholar. She continues her links with Yale at the School of the Environment by teaching and mentoring students as a Fellow of Davenport College, and as a board member of the Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative. She also serves on the Advisory Boards of Oxford University's James Martin School, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability (Arizona State University) and the International Risk Governance Center based at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Lausanne (EPFL) . She recently completed a 10-year term as a founding member of the board of the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and remains a member of the advisory board of the institute's Center for Environmental Studies. Marton-Lefèvre's