Martha A. Darling is a retired corporate executive and a prominent leader in diverse nonprofit organizations, whose contributions have significantly shaped the fields of public policy, business, and conservation in the United States.
A graduate of Reed College and Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she served as a freelance policy consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, analyzing the roles of women in member economies. In 1977, she was appointed a White House Fellow under President Jimmy Carter, serving at the US Treasury with Michael Blumenthal. Subsequently, she became a senior legislative aide to Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.
Ms. Darling’s career featured leadership roles as vice president for strategic planning at Seattle-First National Bank, executive director of the Washington Business Roundtable’s Education Study, and senior program manager at the Boeing Company. She has consulted on education policy for the National Academy of Sciences and chaired the boards of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation.
Her extensive board memberships include the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, the Salzburg Global Seminar, the Maverick Collective, Reed College, the Sphinx Organization, and the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. In addition, she is the founding co-chair of Washtenaw County’s “Success by Six” early childhood initiative.
Ms. Darling also emerged as an influential conservationist, serving as a member of the President’s Leadership Council of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and playing a pivotal role in reviving the NWF Action Fund, which supports wildlife conservation efforts nationwide. Her efforts in this area were recognized through the NWF’s 2016 National Conservation Achievement Award.
Together with her husband, Dr. Gil Omenn, Ms. Darling is a member of the Weizmann Institute’s President’s Circle. Their support for Institute initiatives includes the creation of an endowed fund for the Davidson Institute of Science Education’s annual Ephraim Katzir Lecture, the establishment of the Leah Omenn Career Development Chair and the Dr. Gil Omenn and Martha Darling Professorial Chair in Molecular Genetics, and, most recently, the Dr. Gilbert S. Omenn and Martha A. Darling Weizmann Institute-Schneider Hospital Fund for Clinical Breakthroughs through Scientific Collaborations, to foster collaboration between scientists and clinicians to advance pediatric medicine.