Peter Ryan appointed Director of the FitzPatrick Institute

Peter Ryan has been appointed Director of the FitzPatrick Institute with effect from March 1, 2014.  Peter has been Acting Director since the death of Phil Hockey in January 2013.

Peter 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. 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 is the President of BirdLife South Africa and 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 photographer and believes in the importance of promoting amateur involvement in ornithology. He has written several books about birds and their identification, and is scientific to African Birdlife, a popular magazine about birds produced by BirdLife South Africa.