Joe Roman

Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, academic, and author of the books Whale[1] and Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act.[2] His conservation research includes studies of the historical population size of whales,[3] the role of cetaceans in the nitrogen cycle,[4] the relationship between biodiversity and disease, and the genetics of invasions.[5] He is the founding editor of "Eat the Invaders", a website dedicated to controlling invasive species by eating them.

Roman is a research associate professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.[6] He earned an AB with Honors in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University in 1985[7] and an MA in wildlife ecology and conservation from the University of Florida.[6] Roman was awarded his PhD from Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2003; his dissertation was titled Tracking Anthropogenic Change in the North Atlantic Ocean with Genetic Tools.[8] During his PhD, he co-authored, with Stephen Palumbi, a paper for the journal Science that presented evidence that whale populations had been considerably larger prior to whaling than had previously been thought.[3][8] By 2009, he was working with the Gund Institute with a Science and Technology Policy Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science,[6] and also beginning a collaboration with the United States Environmental Protection Agency looking at loss of biodiversity.[9] He had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil in 2012, and he was the 2014–15[10] Sarah and Daniel Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology at Harvard.[11] Born in Queens, New York, Roman lives in Vermont.