Chief of British University Is Appointed Top Executive of Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation has selected a British university leader and well-known agricultural ecologist to be its new president.

Gordon Conway, who runs the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, will be the first non-American to head the 84-year-old foundation. The fund has assets of $2.8-billion, making it one of the 10 wealthiest in the nation, according to the Foundation Center.

Mr. Conway, who ran the Ford Foundation’s India field office from 1989 to 1992, will replace Peter C. Goldmark, Jr., who is leaving the foundation in December after holding the post for nine years.

The appointment of Mr. Conway — who will assume the presidency in April — underscores the New York foundation’s continuing efforts to break down barriers between its international and domestic grant making. Of the $170-million the fund gave away last year, roughly two-thirds went overseas.

“Today, we’re ready to move beyond the sense that this is a domestic program and this is an international program,” said Alice Stone Ilchman, chairman of Rockefeller’s Board of Trustees and president of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. “Because so many problems transcend national borders — disease, the search for work, technology — we want to be more and more global in our outreach.”

In an interview, Mr. Conway said he would try to help Rockefeller deal with the “great global issues of the 21st century: hunger, unemployment, poverty, discrimination.” He said to do that the foundation might have to restructure its grant-making programs, but he said he had no plans to make that his first priority.

Mr. Conway also said that he intended to continue and strengthen Rockefeller’s grant making in the United States.

“I’m sure that in the urban programs there’s much experience here that can be translated to other parts of the world,” Mr. Conway said. “And equally there’s much that can be learned from experiences elsewhere.”

Mr. Conway’s background is a sharp contrast to that of Mr. Goldmark, who devoted most of his career to working for city and state government agencies dealing with urban problems. However, the new president’s scientific research interests have been in areas that coincide with the Rockefeller tradition. In November, Mr. Conway’s book The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century will be published by Penguin Books. The Rockefeller Foundation has long been credited with being crucial to the “green revolution” that led to major changes in the agricultural systems of many developing countries.

Mr. Conway began his international work in Borneo in the 1960s, where he introduced “integrated pest management,” a system designed to reduce use of dangerous pesticides. > In the late 1980s, he worked with people in northern Pakistan and Ethiopia on solving agricultural and environmental problems, and from 1986 to 1989, he was director of the sustainable-agriculture program at London’s International Institute for Environment and Development.

Mr. Conway also serves on the board of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

Some charity officials were pleased by Mr. Conway’s selection. Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a think tank on global natural-resource and food issues, said, “Given the overall trend of abandoning international issues and international funding by U.S.-based foundations, this hopefully will give momentum to a debate and a change in the other big foundations.”

Mr. Conway was selected from 265 applications over an eight-month selection process. Ms. Ilchman said they included two in-house candidates: Angela Glover Blackwell, a senior vice-president in charge of domestic programs; and Lincoln Chen, a vice-president who heads grant-making programs that include agricultural sciences, health sciences, and the global environment.