Celebrating Brad Gentry: Twenty Years of Building Bridges
Brad Gentry's career defies easy categorization, which is precisely the point. Trained first as a biologist at Swarthmore College and then as a lawyer at Harvard Law School, he built his life's work at an intersection most people didn't believe existed: the place where private capital and environmental progress meet.
That refusal to stay in one lane became the model for how CBEY trains leaders.
“The environmental challenges we face don’t fit neatly within disciplines, and neither can the solutions" says Brad. "We need people who understand the science, but who can also speak the languages of business, policy, finance and communities — and, most importantly, bring those worlds together.”
Celebrating Brad in May 2026 at his retirement party in Kroon Hall
“The work ultimately comes down to people. You can have the right science, the right policy and the right financial model, but change happens when people trust one another enough to work across their differences. That’s what I’ve tried to do throughout my career, and it’s what I hope CBEY will keep doing.”
That conviction was earned in the field. Over a career spanning more than 40 countries, Brad advised corporations, governments, and nonprofits — from GE and Suez Environnement to the World Bank, UNDP, the Land Trust Alliance, and The Trust for Public Land — on how investment could be redirected toward land, water, and cleaner energy. Somewhere along the way, the biologist and the lawyer arrived at a shared conclusion: capital didn't have to be conservation's adversary.
Over time, Brad realized "the question wasn’t whether business and capital would shape the environment; they already did. The question was whether we could redirect those forces toward better environmental outcomes.”
He brought that insight to Yale, where he served as Senior Associate Dean of Professional Practice at the Yale School of the Environment and the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Professor in the Practice, a joint chair across YSE and the Yale School of Management that mirrors the bridge he spent his career building. As co-founder of the Conservation Finance Network and author of Private Capital Flows and the Environment, he helped establish conservation finance as a field. As Faculty Co-Director of CBEY, he shaped the center from its founding into what it is today: a community where students, CEOs, practitioners, and researchers work side by side.
Brad receives a teaching award during the 2009 Commencement ceremony at the Yale School of the Environment (then the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies)
His titles only tell part of the story. To generations of students and colleagues, Brad has been an advisor, a connector, and a friend, the person who could get a banker and a forester to truly hear each other. Hundreds of alumni now carry his imprint in boardrooms, agencies, land trusts, and startups around the world.
When asked what surprises him about what the center has become over the past 20 years, Brad says, “What surprises me, and what I'm most proud of, is that CBEY became much more than a center or a set of programs. It became a community, one where people with very different expertise and perspectives find one another and discover what they can accomplish together.”
In honor of that legacy, and of CBEY's 20th anniversary, the center has launched the Brad Gentry Resource Fund, a campaign to secure the future of the mission he built, and of the generation that will carry it forward.
Brad hopes "that the fund helps students move from asking ‘What should be done?’ to actually trying to do it. Give talented people the resources, relationships and room to experiment, and they will take this work to places we can’t yet imagine.”
Gifts to the Brad Gentry Resource Fund will have their impact multiplied thanks to several matching challenges. Join us in thanking Brad the best way we know how — by investing in the students and ideas he championed.