Dame Georgina Mary Mace, (12 July 1953 – 19 September 2020) was a British ecologist and conservation scientist. She was Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University College London, and previously Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London (2006–2012) and Director of Science at the Zoological Society of London (2000–2006). Education Georgina Mace was born in Lewisham borough of London. Her father was Dr. Bill Mace, a rheumatologist, and her mother was Josephine Mace, a nurse. and educated at the City of London School for Girls before studying at the University of Liverpool where she was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976. She was awarded a PhD on the evolutionary ecology of small mammals in 1979 from the University of Sussex for research supervised by Paul H. Harvey. Research and career Her research interests mainly involved measuring the trends and consequences of biodiversity loss and ecosystem change. She started her career at the Smithsonian Institution to study the impact of inbreeding in zoological collections. Mace continued this work and further researched captive population ecology by studying population viability in zoos. Mace commented that "It was exciting to make quantitative scientific contributions to conservation" She was President of the British Ecological Society, President of the Society for Conservation Biology, a member of the Science Committee of Diversitas. Mace was editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Series B, Biological Sciences) from 2008 to 2010. In 2000, Mace became Director of Science at the Institute of Zoology in London, during which time she was instrumental in developing the criteria for listing species in the IUCN Red List, the most comprehensive inventory on the conservation status of the world's species conservation contributing to the maintenance of global biodiversity and managed by IUCN. Prior to these changes, the Red List was based on nominations from experts rather than data, the changes instigated by Mace and her colleagues took 10 years to be implemented by the IUCN. Many Regional Red List publications are now increasingly based on the same criteria, which account for climate change and other environmental factors in determining extinction threats. Since 2002 she and her colleagues have worked to establish methods for evaluating biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides, and changes in biodiversity that have been provisionally measured by the Red List Index. Mace