Executive Staff
Dr. Cristián Samper
Director
Mailing Address:
Office of the Director
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
MRC 106, P.O. Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
Biography:
Cristián Samper is the Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the largest natural history collection in the world, which hosts more than seven million visitors each year, and holds a collection of 126 million specimens and artifacts. A scientist and an international authority on conservation biology and environmental policy, he has dedicated the majority of his career to understanding and protecting Earth's biological diversity.
Samper served as Acting Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from March 2007 through June 2008, overseeing a complex of Museums, research centers and the National Zoo. Prior to coming to Washington, D.C., he was deputy director and staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the largest research facility for tropical biology.
Samper was the founding director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, the national biodiversity research institute of Colombia, and developed the national biodiversity policy. His devotion to Colombia's ecological preservation earned him the country's National Medal of the Environment in 2001.
Samper served as chairman of the Subsidiary Body of Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and helped to develop a global strategy for plant conservation and the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety. He was also one of the leaders of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a project to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being.
He is a member of the boards of the American Association of Museums, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. He is also a member of Harvard University's Board of Overseers and Bioversity International's Board of Trustees.
Born in San José, Costa Rica, and raised in Colombia, Samper studied biology at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, and earned his master's and doctorate degrees in biology from Harvard University.
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