Advisory Board and Editors Conservation Biology
Yolanda van Heezik
Professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, with an interest in urban ecology. Worked as a wildlife biologist in the Middle East and Southern Africa.
Sara Varela
I am working on Pleistocene mammal extinctions. Co-developer of R packages to download data from open access databases (rAvis and paleobioDB), and team member of www.ecoClimate.org, an open access repository to access climatic data for the past, present and future.
Claudio Vasapollo
I am a marine biologist working as a fishery and benthic researcher at the Institute for Marine Resources and Biotechnologies (IRBIM) of the National Researche Council (CNR) in Ancona, Italy. I held my PhD in 2010 at the The Open University (Milton Keynes, UK) working at the Stazione Zoologica A. Dohrn of Naples (Italy) where I conducted a study on the spatial and temporal distribution of macro benthic assemblages associated to Posidonia oceanica seagrass and on several features of the plant itself. I got a Master degree in 2005 at the Polytechnic University of Marche after the Bachelor's degree in Marine Biology at the same university in 2004. I participated in several surveys at sea in the last years as well as to several diving expeditions in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
Scott Veirs
Oceanographer and bioacoustician facilitating the recovery of endangered regional icons of the Pacific Northwest (U.S.), particularly southern resident killer whales and Pacific salmon. I helped design and was the first major in the Earth Systems program at Stanford University, then earned a M.S. and PhD in Oceanography at the University of Washington. In 2003 I founded Beam Reach and taught ~50 undergraduates and recent graduates to ask and answer their own marine field science questions during 10-week field courses from 2005-2012. During the same period I helped create the Salish Sea Hydrophone Network -- orcasound.net -- which I continue to administer.
Olja Vidjak
Dr. Olja Vidjak's educational background includes an MSc in Oceanology (1998) and a PhD in Biology (2004) from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is a researcher at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries (Croatia), with primary specialization in the ecology and taxonomy of marine zooplankton. Her research interests include the spread and management of aquatic non-native species and marine biodiversity conservation.
Khor Waiho
Researcher at the Institute of Tropical Aquaculture and Fisheries, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Dr. Khor Waiho obtained his Ph.D. in Aquaculture from Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (2016) and completed a 2-year postdoctoral (Biology, 2017-2019) at Shantou University, China. His current research focus includes the impact of climate change on crustacean growth and reproductive biology, population biology and fishery, and the aquaculture of economically important crustacean species.
Dapeng Wang
Dr Dapeng Wang is a Senior Bioinformatician in Integrative Analysis at the COMBAT consortium at the University of Oxford using multi-omics techniques in combination with the cutting-edge bioinformatic approaches and statistical methods to explore the pathogenesis of COVID-19 and stratification of patients as well as inform the treatment strategy based on genomics information.
Dr Wang received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Shandong University in 2006 and obtained a PhD degree in bioinformatics from the Beijing Institute of Genomics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. After his graduation, he continued to conduct research at the same institute from 2011 to 2014 and afterwards moved to the UK to take up various roles at the Cancer Institute at the University College London (2014-2016), the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford (2016-2018) and the LeedsOmics at the University of Leeds (2018-2020).
Eric J Ward
I’m a statistician / quantitative ecologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA) in Seattle and an affiliate professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) at the University of Washington. I work on a wide range of statistical problems – population dynamics, extinction risk, conservation genetics, fisheries stock assessment, reproductive success studies, etc. Most of the species I study are fish, but I also work with data from marine mammals, seabirds, and turtles. Much of my recent modeling interests have been pursuing applications of multivariate state-space time series and spatio-temporal models, isotope mixing models, and Bayesian model selection techniques.
Jane M. Waterman
Professor of Biology at the University of Manitoba and Research Fellow of the Mammal Research Institute, Department of Zoology and Entomology at the University of Pretoria. Academic editor of PLOS ONE and former Associate Editor of the Journal of Mammalogy.
Tom Webb
Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Animal & Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, UK. Marine macroecologist, interested in applying computational methods to mobilise data and to visualise and analyse the distribution and dynamics of marine biodiversity at large spatial scales.
Easton R White
I am a quantitative marine ecologist who uses mathematical and statistical tools, coupled with experiments and field observations, to answer questions in ecology, conservation science, sustainability, and ecosystem management. Most of my work is focused on marine systems, especially fisheries and spatial planning. I am a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Prior to joining UNH, I was a research associate at the University of Vermont with the QuEST program, a NSF-funded PhD traineeship focused on quantitative skills, interdisciplinary work, as well as diversity and inclusion.
I currently conduct research on assessing the effectiveness of protected area networks, improving species monitoring programs, and modeling socio-ecological systems in the context of fisheries. My work centers on how environmental variability, in particular rare events (e.g., hurricanes, COVID-19 pandemic), affects ecosystems and those that depend on them. My current work is funded through a NSF grant focused on interdisciplinary approaches to study coupled natural-human systems with Madagascar fisheries as a case study.
Michael Wink
Prof. Dr. Michael Wink is Professor of Biology and Director at the Institute of Pharmacy and Molecular Biotechnology of Heidelberg University; Head of Biology Department (1989-2019). Senior professor since 2019. Editor of Diversity, Biotechnology Journal and Journal of Ornithology. Member of several editorial boards and scientific societies. Author of over 20 books and over 900 original peer-reviewed publications.