Lisbet Rausing

Anna Lisbet Kristina Rausing (born 9 June 1960) is a science historian and philanthropist. She is a co-founder of Arcadia, one of the UK’s largest philanthropic foundations, and director of Ingleby Farms & Forests (Ingleby Company).

Lisbet Rausing is the eldest daughter of Hans Rausing and his wife Märit Rausing. She has one sister, Sigrid Rausing, and one brother, Hans Kristian Rausing. Her grandfather, Ruben Rausing, was co-founder of the Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak.

Rausing studied History at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., summa cum laude 1984) and completed an M.A.(1987) and Ph.D. (1993) in History at Harvard University, where she taught for eight years.

Harvard University Press published Rausing's scholarly biography of Carl Linnaeus Linnaeus: Nature and Nation in 1999. Throughout her career she has published a range of articles on related subjects in scholarly journals including Representations,Configurations, and History of Political Economy. She has also contributed to the Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and has published a number of pieces on the evolution of archive digitization and on open access to scholarship.

Rausing is a senior research fellow at Imperial College. She holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University and SOAS and she is an elected member of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. She is also an honorary fellow of the British Academy, the Linnean Society, the Royal Historical Society, The Royal Society of Biology and the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. In 2005 she was appointed to the Harvard Board of Overseers and Yad Hanadiv Advisory Committee. She serves on the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Advisory Board and is co-chair of the Harvard Capital Campaign.

Rausing founded and is a director of Ingleby Farms & Forests (Ingleby Company) which owns and farms over 100,000 hectares in nine countries. She also works closely with a family-owned liquid food packaging company, Ecolean.

Lisbet Rausing co-founded the Arcadia Fund in 2001 with her husband Professor Peter Baldwin. As of December 2016, the Fund has made grant commitments of over $440 million to charities and scholarly institutions globally that preserve cultural heritage and the environment and promote open access. Arcadia-funded projects include the Endangered Languages Documentation programme at SOAS, the Endangered Archive Program at the British Library and Fauna & Flora International's Halcyon Land and Sea fund. Rausing has been a vice-president of conservation charity Fauna & Flora International since 2000.