H. Resit Akçakaya

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

H. Resit Akçakaya is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution of Stony Brook University in New York, USA, and is associated with the university's Consortium for Inter-Disciplinary Environmental Research. He completed his Ph.D. in 1989 in theoretical ecology and worked as Senior Scientist at Applied Biomathematics (Setauket, New York), an ecological research and software development company, where he was one of the principal architects of the RAMAS library of software, and developed models for risk assessment and modeling of metapopulations, for integrating metapopulation dynamics with geographic information systems, and for incorporating uncertainty into IUCN criteria for threatened species. He served on the Criteria Review Working Group of the IUCN, and is currently chair of the IUCN Red List Standards and Petitions Subcommittee, which develops guidelines for threatened and endangered species assessments, and evaluates petitions against the red-listing of these species. He is a recipient of the 2012 George Rabb Award for Conservation Innovation, which is given by IUCN Species Survival Commission to individuals in recognition of delivering transformational advances in conservation theory and practice.
Dr. Akçakaya is currently interested in a variety of methods and approaches for assessing the vulnerability of species to extinction; the effects of landscape dynamics on species persistence; projecting human land-use based on human population trends; and predicting the vulnerability of species to global climate change. He has been working in the area of biological conservation since 1980, and has been involved in both practical and theoretical research on problems of species conservation, including several population viability analysis studies. Dr. Akçakaya has over 100 publications in conservation biology and theoretical ecology, including 4 books. He is a co-author of two widely used textbooks (Risk Assessment in Conservation Biology and Applied Population Ecology), and the lead editor of two collections: Species Conservation and Management: Case Studies, which includes population and metapopulation models for 37 species of plants and animals, and Demographic Toxicity: Methods in Ecological Risk Assessment, which is a collection of modeling studies for population-level ecotoxicological assessments. His publications have received a total of over 8,000 citations. He also serves on the editorial boards of Conservation Biology and Population Ecology.