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Welcome visitors to WildCRU
WildCRU were delighted and privileged to welcome Prof Lord Robert May to the Recanati-Kaplan Centre on the occasion of the DPhil viva examination of WildCRU graduate student, Arjun Gopalaswamy on 9th April 2015. Lord May, appointed as Oxford’s internal examiner, was joined by a second eminent scientist taking the role of the external examiner, Prof Nils Christian Stenseth, Research professor of Ecology and Evolution at Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo.
Prof Lord May has been Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and President of the Royal Society, and a Professor at Sydney and Princeton. He now holds joint professorships at Oxford and Imperial College London. He is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a crossbencher in the House of Lords, and an appointed member of the council of the British Science Association. Prof Stenseth is Chair of the University of Oslo’s Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Chair of the Nordic Centre for Research on Marine Ecosystems and Resources under Climate Change, President of the International Biological Union and a Member of the Scientific Council of the The European Research Council.
Arjun’s thesis entitled ‘Addressing methodological issues in the study of tiger metapopulation dynamics in Western Ghats, India’ was complimented by the examiners who joined us in our long-standing WildCRU tradition of toasting our successful graduate students in the Common Room at the Recanati-Kaplan Centre. Arjun is pictured celebrating in the centre with Prof Lord Robert May (far left) and and Prof Nils Christian Stenseth (right) along with his WildCRU supervisors, Director Prof David Macdonald (left) and Deputy Director, and Associate Professor of Conservation Biology Claudio Sillero (far right). Arjun’s co-supervisor in India is Dr Ullas Karanth, Director for Science-Asia, Wildlife Conservation Society, a leading tiger conservationist known for pioneering the use of camera traps for population density studies of large wild mammals in India.
