Helen Marquard

'Helen Marquard PhD, Executive Director, The SEED Initiative.

"Dr. Marquard is the Executive Director of the SEED Initiative which was founded by UNEP, UNDP and IUCN at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. SEED supports emerging social and environmental entrepreneurial partnerships in the developing world: SEED holds an annual global competition and conducts research to determine the main factors for success, for scale-up and for replication. Previously Helen was at the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, leading work in a number of policy areas including international and European sustainable development, chemicals and biotechnology safety. She was responsible for setting up Partners for Environmental Cooperation in Europe (PECE) and is a co-editor of The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Helen has also worked on environment policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. Helen’s academic background is in molecular biology and cancer research. Most of her work was on DNA repair mechanisms at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Cologne, and at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany."