Concept
Martha Crawford (born September 30, 1967) is former head of research and innovation on the managing board of Areva, the French state-owned nuclear power conglomerate. One of a very few Americans in the upper ranks of French business, she has a professional background in environmental policy and engineering. A dual national (US and French) based in Paris, she joined Areva in March 2011 after three years as vice president for group research and development at Air Liquide, one of the top 40 private-sector companies in France. L'Oréal announced in March 2014 that as of October Crawford would join the French cosmetics and beauty group as senior vice president in charge of advanced research and the Scientific Directorate, and member of the Research & Innovation Management Committee. Born in Tucson, Arizona, she grew up on a ranch north of Tucson and attended University High School, a public school for the academically gifted and talented. She studied ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson on an Arizona Board of Regents academic scholarship and a fellowship from the E. Blois du Bois Foundation of Phoenix, Arizona. After graduating in 1989 she worked as an environmental policy intern in the office of Senator Al Gore in Washington, D.C., then as adviser to the head of the Environmental Protection Authority in the republic of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia. She returned to the United States in 1992 to pursue her master's degree and PhD in environmental engineering at Harvard University (with master's coursework and PhD supervision in chemical engineering based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). She was awarded the PhD in 1997 and moved to Paris, where she received her Master of Business Administration degree from the Collège des Ingénieurs. After working at Suez S.A. in Paris, in 1999 Crawford joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
