Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph.D. is an urban ecologist on a mission to improve pollinator health worldwide as a means to support our global food system and transform our urban areas from gray to green. He is co-founder and CEO at The Best Bees Company, the nation’s largest beekeeping service. Noah pioneered a standardized data-centric approach to beekeeping that has yielded new insights into not just what’s killing pollinators, but what makes them thrive. 

His perspective – as both a leading scientist in his field and the CEO of a growing LGBTQ+ business – inspires audiences to understand the fierce urgency of now and how they can take action to build a sustainable future. Noah is a thought provoking and candid industry expert, championing technology and innovation to solve some of the grand challenges of our time.

He has been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Fox News, Fortune, and Business Insider, and his three TEDx talks have over 2 million views.

Topics:

  • What can bees, with their queens and worker bees, teach us about leadership and decision making? Honeybees have extraordinary social systems that have ensured their success for 100 million years. Noah delivers a fascinating talk on how we can use their sophisticated yet simple rules to guide us in today’s business setting. He melds 21st century beekeeping with age-old lessons from the hive, leaving audiences with a refreshed perspective on teamwork and driving change.

  • Everybody who eats food needs bees, and yet they're dying like never before. We're living in a moment when grassroots efforts like citizen science projects can make a real impact to combat ecological disasters, but when will we fully mobilize them? Dr. Noah Wilson-Rich co-founded The Best Bees Company while he was a college student, using just a Facebook page with a call to action for citizens to get beehives that contribute data. A decade into this project, these beehives on skyscraper rooftops and home gardens nationwide have collectively produced one of the largest data sets on bee health in existence. In this talk, join Noah on this deep dive into a major citizen science program, and learn fascinating insights into climate change resiliency, food system stability, and pollinator health to #SavetheBees from partnerships with MIT, Harvard, TED, National Geographic, and NASA among others.

  • Bees are remarkable animals that have a 100 million years of evolution’s influences on successful social systems. We humans have been around for only about 10,000 years, and we continue to struggle globally about what the best means of running our society, companies, and nations should be. What lessons can we learn from other, non-human societies, in order to be our best selves? Learn takeaways that may enable us to skip a few mistakes and fast track our advancement toward improving the human condition for our organizations, enterprises, and selves.

Bees are dying off in record numbers, but ecologist Noah Wilson-Rich is interested in something else: Where are bees healthy and thriving? To find out, he recruited citizen scientists across the US to set up beehives in their backyards, gardens and rooftops.