Joshua Tewksbury is the US Global Hub director of Future Earth, the president and board chair of Future Earth US and the co-founder and executive editor of Anthropocene Magazine. He holds faculty positions at the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University, and George Mason University. He is leading the Future Earth PEGASuS 2 — Ocean Sustainability project.

Tewksbury was born in California, and he grew up living on US farms. He received a bachelor’s degree from Prescott College (US) in 1992, and a PhD from the University of Montana (US) in 2000. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Florida.  

Tewksbury is trained as an ecologist and he is widely published in the fields of conservation and sustainability. For the past 15 years, Tewksbury has been building programs, centers, colleges and initiatives focused on the intersection of research and sustainability. At Future Earth, Tewksbury manages a wide range of partnerships and programs, including the Program for Early-stage Grants Advancing Sustainability Science (PEGASuS), the Leopold Leadership Program, and Future Earth’s engagement with the Belmont Forum, where this work has led to the mobilization of over $25 million in public and private sector research funding. As co-founder and executive editor of Anthropocene Magazine, he manages all aspects of business development, and works daily with the editorial staff to match content and strategy. 

Before joining Future Earth, Tewksbury was the founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute (Switzerland), where he launched 11 collaborative research projects and developed the Luc Hoffmann Fellows program into the only co-mentored conservation-focused postdoctoral fellowship program focused on recruiting talent globally. Before the launch of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, he was an endowed professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, where he led a university-wide initiative to create the University of Washington College of the Environment.