Draft:Randolph Thaman

Randolph Thaman (academic)
He currently resides in Suva, Fiji. He is from Orinda, California. He currently works at the University of the South Pacific (UPS) - school of Geography, Earth science and Environment. He is under the faculty of Islands and oceans. His teaching is primarily community based bio-diversity conservation, Pacific floras and ethnobiology, agrobiodiversity and food security, invasive species, ecosystem restoration and species recovery on small degraded islands and marine reserves or managed areas. He first joined the University of the South Pacific in 1974. The University of the South Pacific is collectively owned by 12 Pacific island states. He is the only UPS staff member to have both researched and published work on all 12 different UPS countries. Over the decades he has mentored and empowered many Pacific Islanders, a majority who are leaders in natural resource conservation and natural resource management in a range of organizations from government institutions to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Professor Randolph Thaman has been a member of the IUCN World's Commission on Protected areas since 1988, a founding member in the Commission of Education and Communication and a previous member of the Oceania Regional committee. He has also co-authored a numbered of State of the Environment reports. He has done these reports for Kiribati and Tuvalu for the 1992 summit in Rio, the National Environmental Monitoring Standards (NEMS) for Nauru. He has also done conservation area plans for Fiji, Kiribati and Tonga. This includes the only Ramsar site in Fiji. More recently he represented Fiji in the victorious establishment of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. In September 2012 he was awarded an Honorary membership of the IUCN by the International Union for Conservation of Nature at conference in Jeju, Korea for his outstanding contribution to nature.