Professor Dame EJ Milner-Gulland
Before joining the University of Oxford in November 2015, I was Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London for 15 years, and have held previous positions in Resource Economics and Mathematical Ecology at Oxford, Imperial and Warwick Universities.
My first degree was in Pure and Applied Biology at Oxford, and my PhD at Imperial was on the exploitation of elephants, rhinos and saigas.
I have a particular interest in developing and applying methods for understanding and predicting human behaviour in the context of local resource use in developing countries, and improving the effectiveness of incentive-based mechanisms such as payment for ecosystems services and biodiversity offsetting, in the marine and terrestrial realms.
I also work on the illegal wildlife trade and am interested in designing, monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions in order to improve their effectiveness.
Finally, I am passionate about the conservation ecology of the saiga antelope in Central Asia, and co-founded the Saiga Conservation Alliance in 2006.
I am Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity in the Biology Department. I am Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science; a group of around 40 researchers covering a range of research areas within the broad area of understanding, predicting and mitigating biodiversity impacts, and monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions for their social and biodiversity outcomes.
This includes large programmes on food systems, Nature Positive transitions, the wildlife trade, and social justice and equity. I aim to ensure that all the research in my group is addressing issues identified by practitioners and policy-makers, is carried out collaboratively with end-users, and builds the capacity of early-career conservationists, particularly in low-income countries.
I have launched a number of initiatives which aim to change the real-world conversation around conservation, including the Nature-Positive Universities intiative and the Conservation Optimism movement. You can view my research group’s website.
I teach in the broad areas of ecology, biodiversity and conservation, on the Biology MBiol course. I also supervise graduate students in conservation science.
