Patrick Beary
Patrick Beary is the Bruce H. Bailey Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, where he leads the Center’s external partnership and knowledge-to-impact strategy. Since joining Cornell Atkinson in 2019, Beary has built the Center’s strategic partnership platform from the ground up, growing a portfolio of active strategic collaborations and scaling externally funded programs. He directs Cornell Atkinson’s Innovation for Impact Fund, overseeing strategic research-to-impact investments, and leads a cross-functional team stewarding over seventy active projects with partners spanning corporations, NGOs, foundations, and government agencies.
Beary works at the intersection of academic research and external implementation, partnering with Cornell faculty, deans, and institutional leaders to translate sustainability research into real-world outcomes with non-traditional partners across climate, food systems, energy transition, and biodiversity. He advises Center leadership on institutional priorities, portfolio design, and engagement strategy, and serves as a key resource for faculty leading collaborative research initiatives with external partners.
Prior to Cornell, Beary spent six years at The Nature Conservancy, where he rose to Director of Corporate Engagement for Global Food and Agriculture, leading private-sector partnership strategy for global agriculture and food systems. He began his career in Buenos Aires, where he lived and worked for nearly six years as a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow, graduate student in political economy at Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and consultant in energy and sustainability markets across Latin America. He is bilingual in English and Spanish.