Nat Conard grew up in Vermont on the campus of a small boarding school, The Mountain School, which his parents founded in the early sixties. After graduating from Yale University in 1981 with a B.S. in biology, he began his career in education in the public schools of rural New Hampshire where he taught math and biology, coached, and began a computer literacy program at Orford High School. Nat then earned an M.B.A from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and spent two years as a strategic management consultant with Bain & Company in Boston, where he worked with and then led teams of consultants working directly for senior client executives on the critical issues facing their businesses.

In 1988 Nat returned to academia and spent the next 10 years at Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School, a small boarding and day school in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he oversaw fundraising, admissions, marketing, and communications as Director of Development and Director of External Affairs, taught math, and chaired the math department. His next stop was the Emma Willard School, a girls’ boarding school in Troy, New York, where he continued to teach math and coach and served as Academic Dean and then Assistant Head for Academics. In 2005, Nat became the Headmaster at The Pingry School, a large K-12 day school with campuses in Short Hills and Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Nat serves or has served on the boards of New Jersey SEEDS, the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools (NJAIS), and the Independent School Data Exchange (INDEX), and he has served on or chaired accreditation committees for NJAIS and the New York Association of Independent Schools. Nat has presented on topics including faculty evaluation, finance and financial sustainability, strategic planning, making changes to health and benefit programs, and responding to historical instances of sexual abuse at conferences including the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) annual conference, the INDEX annual conference, NJAIS Trustee Enrichment Day, NJAIS Leadership Institute, and the Florida Council of Independent Schools Finance Institute. He is a member of the Country Day School Headmasters Association, Head Mistresses Association of the East, and The Heads Network.

Nat joined Educators’ Collaborative in 2020.