Claire Kremen is an American conservation biologist. She is a professor of conservation biology at the University of British Columbia, having formerly worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where she remains professor emerita.

Kremen graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Biology in 1982, and from Duke University with a PhD in Zoology in 1987.^[1]

Upon completing her PhD, Kremen spent 10 years working for nonprofit organizations in conservation biology.^[2] She studied the impacts of Deforestation in Madagascar, on species distributions with a Web-based biodiversity database.^[3] Kremen eventually returned to North American and accepted a faculty position at Princeton University for four years before becoming a professor of environmental science, policy and management at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).^[2]

During her early tenure at UC Berkeley, Kremen also served as a member on the Committee on Status of Pollinators where she led the first global study on crop production that is reliant upon animal pollination.^[4] In recognition of her research, she was named a 2007 MacArthur Fellows Program, which came with an unrestricted $500,000 award for the next five years.^[3] In the same year, Kremen was also awarded a Hellman Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for her project "How does Biological Diversity Promote Ecosystem Services: a Mechanistic Study of Almond Crop Pollination in a Changing California Landscape."^[5] As an associate professor of environmental science, policy and management, Kremen led a study in 2011 which concluded that farmers could become more cost-efficient if they relied less on renting honey bees.^[6] In recognition of her academic achievements, Kremen was elected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 2013^[7] and appointed Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.^[8]

In 2019, Kremen left UC Berkeley to become one of the first University of British Columbia (UBC) President’s Excellence Chair in Biodiversity Studies at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.^[9] While serving in this role, she was awarded an honorary degree from the American Museum of Natural History in "recognition of her extraordinary contributions to science, education and society."^[10] In 2020, Kremen was the recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize for "exploring the way to a sustainable world."^[11]