Who We Are: Regional Staff
Lynn McClure, Midwest Regional Director
As a lifelong resident of the Midwest, Lynn McClure loves the region’s parks. Every summer growing up her family made the trek to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northwestern Michigan to do the legendary “Dune Climb.” And at least once a year, her parents put Lynn and her three siblings in the back to the station wagon and headed for a tour of President’s homes, Civil War battlefields, or other historic sites.
In addition to a passion for the National Parks, Lynn brings a wealth of professional experience to NPCA. She is an award-winning strategic planning and public relations consultant who has worked with many conservation and environmental organizations, public park agencies, as well as Fortune 500 companies. Lynn developed an innovative public consensus-building campaign that resulted in securing $36 million of state funding for open space and natural area acquisition in Illinois.
Nathan Miller, Air Quality Specialist
Nathan Miller joined NPCA as a Walter Fellow in the Midwest Regional Office in August 2009. As a teenager, Nathan had the opportunity to live for a summer in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, performing trail reconstruction with the Student Conservation Association. He’s been hooked on national parks ever since, and is grateful to be working for their protection at NPCA.
Prior to joining NPCA, Nathan advocated for local community and environmental groups with the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at Washington University’s School of Law. He has continued this work as an independent consultant since moving to Chicago, and has contributed to multi-million dollar settlements and legal decisions resulting in dramatically lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Nathan’s work at NPCA focuses on protecting visibility in the Region's northern Class I areas - Voyageurs and Isle Royale National Parks - by working to reduce air pollution from industrial sources and power plants. Nathan works directly with the National Parks of Minnesota, and throughout the upper Midwest, to build strong voices of support for these treasured landscapes.
Raised in New England, Nathan was introduced to the beauty of the Midwest while attending Washington University in St. Louis. During college, he co-founded The Wilderness Project, a program for incoming students designed to facilitate discussions of social justice and provide an introduction to the regional landscape. Nathan graduated with a B.S. in applied science in chemical engineering, environmental studies, and math.
Naureen Rana, Program Manager
Naureen joined the Midwest Regional Office in February 2010. She came to NPCA from the Great Lakes Protection Fund, a permanent environmental endowment that supports collaborative actions to improve the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem, where she was a program officer with primary responsibility for managing the Fund’s portfolio of active projects. Prior to that, Naureen was a program associate at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization working to advance conservation and sustainable natural resource management by developing innovative, practical, and broadly-supported solutions to conservation challenges. In her capacity there, she worked closely with representatives of the USDA Forest Service and other organizations to design and implement projects that built support for community-based forestry, wildfire management, and sustainable forest management certification, among other topics.
Naureen has a B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in environmental policy from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources & Environment. She loves to travel and has been to many of our national parks.
