Home Appointments CEO
CEO
National Geographic Society
| Appointee | Jill Tiefenthaler |
|---|---|
| Role | CEO |
| Organisation | National Geographic Society |
| Domain | Sciences |
| Start | 1 August 2020 |
| End | Currently in role |
| Notes | First woman CEO of NGS — major archaeology / exploration funder |
Institutional context
The National Geographic Society is a private non-profit founded in 1888, focused on geographic exploration, scientific research, and education. It funds substantial archaeological, palaeontological, and exploration fieldwork through its Explorer programme and its various grant cycles, making it one of the principal private funders of archaeology in the United States. The Chief Executive Officer is the senior administrative officer of the Society. From 1888 through August 2020 every CEO and President of the Society was male.
Career path
Jill Tiefenthaler (born 1965) earned a BA from Saint Mary's College and an MA and PhD in economics from Duke University. She held faculty and senior administrative positions at Colgate University and Wake Forest University before serving as President of Colorado College from July 2011 to 2020 — the first woman in that role.
Appointment
The National Geographic Society Board of Trustees announced her appointment as CEO in early 2020 and she took office in August 2020. She is the first woman CEO of the National Geographic Society in its 132-year history.
Tenure
Active. The early phase of her tenure has included substantial expansion of the Society's grant-making to women explorers and scientists, the launch of the Explorer Classroom programme, and the Society's response to the post-pandemic decline in print-magazine subscriptions and the related restructuring at National Geographic magazine. Her appointment as a research-funding institution head — rather than a research-conducting one — places her in the small group of women who lead the principal grant-making bodies in the sciences.
Cluster context
Tiefenthaler's 2020 appointment is part of the dataset's broader 2020–2021 corporate-and-institutional cluster (Tomé at UPS, Lynch at CVS, Fraser at Citi all in 2020–2021; Suluhu Hassan in Tanzania, Castro in Honduras, Boluarte in Peru in 2021–2022). At the science-funding level her appointment is contemporaneous with the Biden first-weeks regulatory cluster discussed in the regulatory-agency-cluster analysis.