Our People

Catherine uses her experience in organisational development, markets and risk, alongside her fascination with the natural world to support a wide range of work that promotes the protection and regeneration of nature.

Catherine embraced her growing interest in the environment in 2014, taking on pro-bono work at Synchronicity Earth. She became a trustee of Synchronicity Earth in 2016 and took on the role of CEO in 2017. Having worked with the team to build robust infrastructure and to deliver significant growth in grant funding across a range of biodiversity programmes, she stepped down in December 2019 to revert to her trustee role.

She is also Chair of the Environmental Funders Network and Chair of the Global Council of SHOAL, an initiative to increase freshwater conservation. She has a particular interest in shifting decision-making in the finance sector to fully incorporate environmental impacts and risks.

With her husband Tim, she is learning about what is needed to regenerate an upland farm, at Kingsdale Head in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Catherine worked at J.P Morgan until 1998. As Managing Director and Global Head of Equity Derivative Trading, she was also a member of the J.P. Morgan Risk Committee. She then took a career break and returned to the financial markets to undertake project work in 2012. She has a degree in Chemistry from Oxford University.

Jessica is a creative, natural connector. She draws on her personal experience in philanthropy to encourage others to reimagine how they can more effectively support those on the frontlines of environmental defence.

Her deep understanding of the importance of bio-cultural conservation and its crucial role in ensuring a healthy future has guided her philanthropic work.

As a strategic convenor, she organises fora to ensure that the key voices needed to inform important discussions on our collective futures are present together and in productive dialogues.

Jessica’s philanthropic journey began over 25 years ago when she formed a partnership with Adam Sweidan. With the creation of The Synchronicity Foundation, she oversaw donations to a range of projects that addressed social and economic justice; education, children’s welfare, and the arts; healthcare, poverty alleviation, and the refugee crisis; and conservation.

Synchronicity Earth, a UK-based charity, launched in November 2009 as their focus shifted to global biodiversity, creating an organisation to leverage their interest and support, to address urgent, overlooked, and underfunded conservation.

A decade on, Jessica co-founded Flourishing Diversity, a network initiative centred on uplifting, aligning with, and evidencing the interrelation between cultural and biological diversity.

Jessica has been an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Patron of Nature since 2012, helping to raise the visibility of global conservation needs worldwide, while championing inclusive, rights-based practice.

Jessica is also Chair of Synchronicity Earth USA (501c3), an Honorary Conservation Fellow at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), on the Board of Trustees of Wildscreen, and a Strategic Advisor for the Environmental Funders Network (EFN), Action for Conservation, and Conservation Optimism. Jessica holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Northwestern University.

Kristen Walker Painemilla is Senior Vice President at Conservation International, where she leads global efforts to advance inclusive conservation grounded in human rights, governance, and community leadership. Her work contributes to a growing global movement to reimagine conservation as part of a broader systems transformation – one that recognises the deep interdependence between people, nature, and climate.

Throughout her career, Kristen has championed the integration of human rights and the social dimensions of conservation, including supporting the establishment of the Conservation Initiative on Human Rights in 2009.

She has been a leading architect in advancing direct access finance for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, working to transform how conservation and climate finance is governed and delivered. Through her leadership, she has helped shape new models that shift power and resources to communities stewarding critical ecosystems, influencing philanthropy, governments, and multilateral institutions.

Her work is informed by long-term engagement with Indigenous communities, including Mapuche in southern Chile.

From 2016 to 2025, she served as Chair of the IUCN Commission on Environment, Economic and Social Policy, helping to catalyse global dialogue at the intersection of nature, culture, and justice.

Kristen brings deep experience in systems change, coalition-building, and global engagement, and is committed to advancing community-led solutions at scale.

Mike Barclay spent ten years running the Mandai Wildlife Group, which operates Singapore\’s leading nature and wildlife precinct.  This includes five open-concept zoological parks, indoor nature-based attractions and a resort hotel, all carefully planned to integrate with the surrounding rainforest nature reserve.

Mike also helped to found the charitable organisation Mandai Nature, which develops and delivers wildlife conservation programmes at scale across Southeast Asia.

Prior to that, his varied career included running Sentosa Development Corporation, which oversees a mixed-use tropical island destination near Singapore, and the regional Southeast Asian airline SilkAir.  He has served as a director for a wide variety of commercial, charitable and government-linked companies.

Mike holds a MSc in Transport Planning and Engineering from Leeds University in the UK.  He also attended Harvard\’s Advanced Management Program.

Salisha works at the intersection of community-led conservation, organisational development and systems change, with over a decade of experience across Africa. She is Director of Strategic Initiatives at Maliasili, a Director at Lion Guardians, and Co-Founder of Kenyans United Against Poaching.

Born and raised in Kenya, her work is grounded in a deep commitment to both cultural and ecological conservation. Her journey into the sector has been anything but linear – beginning in finance on Wall Street, moving through strategy consulting and entrepreneurship across industries ranging from manufacturing to tourism, before finding her way into conservation. This diverse background continues to shape how she approaches complexity, problem-solving, and systems change.

She has worked closely with communities, civil society organisations, and conservation networks across East, West, and Central Africa, and brings a grounded understanding of how conservation unfolds in practice. She is particularly interested in how conservation can better reflect local knowledge, relationships, and values, while also pushing for more creative and systemic approaches to long-term impact.

Salisha is a member of the African Conservation Leadership Network and a Kinship Conservation Fellow. She holds an MBA from London Business School and an MPhil in Conservation Leadership from the University of Cambridge.

Simon Stuart was our Director of Strategic Conservation (2017-2020), then Chief Scientific Adviser (2020-present) and now also serves as a member of our Board of Trustees.

Simon previously worked for the IUCN Secretariat for over 20 years (including a stint as Acting Director General), and was then Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) from 2008 to 2016. He was Executive Director of A Rocha International in 2020-2023.

Among other things, he was instrumental in the development of the Categories and Criteria for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and also the Key Biodiversity Areas global standard. He has played a prominent role in addressing the global amphibian extinction crisis, and has authored numerous high-impact scientific papers and books.

For all this work, he won the Blue Planet Prize in 2020 and the Harold Jefferson Coolidge Memorial Medal in 2025.

Tom Fernandez is a founder of Balto Therapeutics, a specialty pharmaceutical company in New York.

Previously, he co-founded Retrophin, Inc., a public biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing and marketing innovative therapies for rare, catastrophic childhood diseases.

Before that, he was a partner at a family of hedge funds, Galleon Group, where he led Investor Relations and the global marketing effort. Prior to Galleon, Tom was Assistant Dean for MBA Career Services and Director of The Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School.

He is a member of the advisory board of Equity for Children, a nonprofit organisation that strives to advance an agenda of social justice, human rights and social equality for children worldwide. Tom holds a BA in History from Yale University and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

William works as an adviser to conservation organisations, focusing generally on leadership and strategy.

His work is divided between funding, campaigning and operating organisations in the UK and front line community-based conservation NGOs around the world.

Before becoming a trustee William advised Synchronicity Earth on its strategy. He also works with one of our partner organisations in Thailand.

William spent over 20 years in private equity at Graphite Capital, gaining broad organisational experience. He also worked as the hands-on chair to two companies and an educational NGO, and in various other positions before committing the majority of his time to biodiversity conservation.

He went to Oxford University, from where he has a degree in History and a postgraduate diploma in History of Art.