Thomas Kaplan

Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan is a Franco-American entrepreneur, philanthropist, environmentalist, and art collector. He is the Chairman of precious metals-focused asset management firm The Electrum Group; past President and Chairman of the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan’s premier cultural and community center; Founder and former Executive Chairman of Panthera, the global leader in big cat conservation; Founder of The Leiden Collection, the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age art; and past Chairman of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), a multilateral organization led by France, the United Arab Emirates, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Kaplan stands among the world’s foremost advocates of wildlife conservation. Along with the late Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, he founded Panthera in 2006 to protect and preserve big cats and their ecosystems from extinction — an enterprise that now encompasses over a hundred partnerships in forty countries. In 2009, the Kaplans endowed the Recanati-Kaplan Center at Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), creating the preeminent university-based center for felid conservation, and the Postgraduate Diploma in International Wildlife Conservation Practice to train young conservationists from developing countries. In 2014, Dr. Kaplan launched the Global Alliance for Wild Cats, an international coalition of the world’s leading environmental philanthropists, together with the then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, H.H. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and other committed Chinese and Indian donors. In 2019, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially joined the Global Alliance. Dr. Kaplan is also the Founder and Chairman of The Orianne Society, a U.S.-based environmental organization protecting imperiled reptiles and amphibians, and of the Indian Ocean Tortoise Alliance (IOTA), a Seychelles-based NGO dedicated to the preservation of Aldabra giant tortoises and island ecosystems.

Dr. Kaplan earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Among other distinctions, for services to France, he was appointed Chevalier (2012) — and subsequently promoted to Officier (2020) — in the National Order of the Legion of Honor, as well as Commandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters (2017). In 2018, he was awarded the rank of Officier in the Order of Orange-Nassau for his efforts in disseminating Dutch culture and building bridges between people through art.