Alison Richard

Dame Alison Fettes Richard, DBE, DL (born 1 March 1948) is an English anthropologist, conservationist and university administrator.

[5] In 1972, she moved to Yale University where she taught and continued her research on the ecology and social behavior of wild primates in Central America, West Africa, the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan, and the southern forests of Madagascar.

With collaborators and students, she led a program of field observation, capture and release, anatomical measurement, and genetic and hormone sampling, of more than 700 individually known sifaka from 1984 to the present.

During her tenure, she led several major changes in university policy, ranging from intellectual property to undergraduate financial aid, re-organized management of the university's endowment, and expanded Cambridge's global partnerships, most notably in the US, China, India, Singapore, and the Persian Gulf.

[7] For more than three decades, she has worked with colleagues to help conserve the reserve's unique natural heritage, sponsor training and research by students from Madagascar and elsewhere, and to enhance socio-economic opportunities for people living in and around the forest.

[12] She serves as an advisor to the Liz Claiborne/Art Ortenberg Foundation, Arcadia Fund, and to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.