Greg Collins is the Director of the USAID Center for Resilience, and serves as the Agency’s Resilience Coordinator. Collins is a recognized global thought leader on resilience and has played a lead role in developing and operationalizing a strategic vision for resilience at USAID.

Collins was based in Kenya during the 2011 drought emergency there and helped lead the development of USAID’s Horn of Africa resilience strategy in 2012. He also helped lead the development of USAID’s Sahel resilience strategy in 2012-13.  He continues to provide strategic guidance and technical support on resilience to missions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, including the Agency flagship resilience portfolios in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Nepal. 

Prior to coming to USAID in 2010, Collins worked for more than a decade as a strategy and technical advisor on food security, monitoring and evaluation, and vulnerability assessment and analysis to various UN agencies (FAO, WFP, UNICEF) and NGOs in east and southern Africa and the Middle East.   

Collins holds an MPH from Tulane University with a specialization in food security and monitoring and evaluation, and a PhD in Economic Sociology from the University of California Davis where his research explored Somalia’s telecommunications industry as an instance of development (and resilience) "without state."