Joe Roman

Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and author of the books Whale^[1], Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act, ^[2] and Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World. 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.^[6]

Roman is a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.^[7] He earned an AB with Honors in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University in 1985^[8] and an MA in wildlife ecology and conservation from the University of Florida.^[7] 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.^[9] 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][9] 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,^[7] and also beginning a collaboration with the United States Environmental Protection Agency looking at loss of biodiversity.^[10] He had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil in 2012, and he was the 2014–15^[11] Sarah and Daniel Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology at Harvard.^[12] Born in Queens, New York, Roman lives in Vermont.