Giant Panda Expert Team Co-chair

Ron serves San Diego Zoo Global as the Brown Endowed Director of Recovery Ecology and is the General Scientific Director of Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. As head of the Zoo’s giant panda program, he supervises a number of research projects with giant pandas ranging from conservation breeding to population ecology. Since 1995 his research with pandas has emphasized the use of behavioral and ecological knowledge to solve conservation problems through collaboration with a variety of other research teams predominantly in China. As director of a large team of conservation biologists based at the Zoo, he also works on a number of other species and conservation problems, with a focus on conservation breeding, translocation biology, and population monitoring and adaptive management.  He holds a Bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior from the University of California at Davis. His current research interests with pandas address reintroduction biology, limiting ecological resources, emerging anthropogenic threats, and behavioral ecology.