Authors

Ed Louis has been the Director of the Conservation Genetics Department for Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo Grewcock Center for Conservation and Research for the past 19 years. He received his BS in Marine Biology, DVM and PhD in Genetics from Texas A&M University in 1984, 1994 and 1996, respectively. His extensive fieldwork in Madagascar since 1998, has developed baseline molecular, distribution, and census data on its lemurs, boas, tortoises, geckos, amphibians, and orchids which has resulted in 23 newly described lemur species, and two chameleon and one leaf-tailed gecko newly described species. In 2010, Ed Louis founded the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership, a Malagasy NGO, which manages community based conservation programs at four strategic lemur priority sites in Madagascar, along with continuing to collect, generate and evaluate biodiversity data across Madagascar.

Olivier Langrand is Executive Director of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) and is based in Arlington, VA, USA. He holds a Master of Science in Zoology from the University of Natal, South Africa, and has 30 years of experience in the design and implementation of field research and tropical forest conservation programs. He is also an expert on the birds of the southwestern Indian Ocean islands, and the author of more than 80 scientific papers and four books on the biodiversity of the Africa and Madagascar region. Olivier lived in Madagascar for 12 years, and was awarded the Order of National Merit in 1997 by the President of Madagascar for his outstanding contributions to biodiversity conservation.

Frank Hawkins is Director for North America at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). He lived in Madagascar for nearly 20 years, working on conservation projects and researching birds, primates, and carnivores. He completed a PhD on the conservation of western Malagasy birds in 1994.

Jonah Ratsimbazafy received his PhD in Physical Anthropology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2002, based on a study of black-and-white ruffed lemurs in Madagascar’s Manombo forests. For five years he was in charge of the Training and Conservation Coordinator for Durrell’s Madagascar Programme. He is now the General Secretary of the Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar (GERP), and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Paleontology and Anthropology at the University of Antananarivo.

Christian Roos is a geneticist at the German Primate Centre (DPZ) and Deputy Regional Coordinator of the Southeast Asian section of the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group. He studies the phylogeny, phylogeography and population genetic structure of various primate groups. Although working mainly on Asian primates, he has performed several molecular studies on Malagasy lemurs, including indriids, cheirogaleids and lepilemurids. He received his PhD in Biology from the Technical University of Munich in 2003.