Professor Peter Ryan is director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, which forms the core of a DST-NRF Centre of Excellence using birds as keys to biodiversity conservation. He completed his MSc and PhD in zoology at UCT. After a short stint teaching at the University of California Davis he returned to UCT in 1993 to coordinate the very successful MSc course in conservation biology.

Ryan’s broad research interests centre on understanding and managing environmental issues that affect birds, including plastic pollution at sea, island restoration, impacts of fisheries on seabirds, and infrastructure impacts on terrestrial birds. In addition to more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, he has written 12 popular books on birds and the wildlife of sub-Antarctic islands.