Kieran Suckling

Suckling founded the Center for Biological Diversity while working on doctoral dissertation in 1989 along with Peter Galvin, Robin Silver and Todd Schulke. He served as executive director from 1989 to 2004, policy director from 2005 to 2007, and became executive director again in 2008.

In 1989 Suckling entered a PhD program in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His area of concentration was phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, anthropology and religion. He taught Introduction to World Religions and Introduction to Eastern Religions to undergraduates in the Religious Studies Department. In 1990, he began work on a Doctoral Dissertation on the relationship between the extinction of species, languages and cultures.

During the summers, Suckling worked as a Mexican spotted owl and northern goshawk surveyor on National Forests and Native American reservation lands in New Mexico and Arizona. He started the Center for Biological Diversity in Reserve, NM, with Earth First!, owl surveying and native lands protection friends in 1989. He moved west permanently in 1992 (to Reserve) to work full time on endangered species and public land protection. He left the Stony Brook University doctoral program in 1999, receiving an MA in philosophy.

He received a BA in Philosophy from College of the Holy Cross in 1987 and went on to study natural language processing as a fellow at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information and math at Columbia University. He backpacked in national parks and wilderness areas throughout Canada, the United States and Mexico for two years, funding his travels by working as a cook in Missoula, Montana. It was during these years that he first became an environmental activist, working with Earth First! groups in Montana, New Mexico and Arizona.

Kierán Suckling (born 1964) is one of the founders and the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation group known for its innovative approaches to the protection of endangered species, wilderness, clean air and clean water.

Suckling's parents and siblings immigrated to the United States from Ireland and England in the 1960s. He is the only member of his immediate family born in the United States. As a child, he lived with his family in Ireland, England, Peru, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts. Following the divorce of his parents, he settled in Cape Cod, graduating from Sandwich High School in 1982. He entered Salve Regina University in Rhode Island in 1982, then transferred the following year to double major in computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. He was very culturally and politically active in college, editing literary and science magazines, organizing poetry readings, founding a chapter of Student Pugwash USA, working for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group and participating in numerous political rallies and teach-ins opposing U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and advocating global nuclear disarmament.