Peter G. Ryan

Director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town: http://www.fitzpatrick.uct.ac.za/docs/peter.html Peter Ryan graduated from the University of Cape Town, researching the impacts of ingested plastic on seabirds (MSc) and the evolutionary ecology of buntings in the Tristan archipelago (PhD). After a post-doc at the University of California he was appointed academic Coordinator of the Masters Programme in Conservation Biology at the Fitztitute in 1993. He was appointed as Director of the FitzPatrick Institute in 2013, following the untimely death of Phil Hockey. Although he mostly works on seabirds and their conservation, he has wide-ranging interests in avian biology, and still maintains an interest in plastic pollution, especially in marine systems. He has served as the President of BirdLife South Africa and is an associate editor of Antarctic Science and Bird Conservation International. He has been an honorary Conservation Officer at Tristan da Cunha since 1989, and is a member of Tristan’s Biodiversity Advisory Group. He has spent more than a year on Inaccessible Island, studying the island's endemic buntings as well as conducting surveys of threatened birds and conducting control programmes against alien plants. He is a keen birder and believes in the importance of promoting amateur involvement in ornithology. He has written several books about birds and their identification, and is scientific editor to African Birdlife, a popular magazine about birds produced by BirdLife South Africa.