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Peter G Ryan
Summary
Peter Ryan is the Director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He was born in Yorkshire, UK, but moved to Cape Town at age 10, where he was schooled in Fish Hoek before completing his undergraduate training in Botany and Zoology at UCT. Having had a long-standing interest in birds, he joined the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology to study the impact of plastic ingestion on seabirds for his masters degree, and then completed his doctoral studies on the radiation of finches in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago. Peter taught ornithology at the University of California Davis before returning to UCT in 1993 to co-ordinate the Fitz’s masters programme in conservation biology. Although he works on a variety of topics, seabirds and their conservation are his main focus. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, ten books and 200 popular articles on birds and their conservation.