Joe Roman

Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, naturalist, and writer at the University of Vermont (UVM). His research focuses on endangered species conservation, marine mammal ecology, and ecosystem services.

At Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Roman will complete a popular book—“Eat, Poop, Die”—that explores how animals shape our world through predation, defecation, and death. As our understanding of animal ecology has changed, the way we value marine and terrestrial ecosystems is also in transition, with a shift from industrial extraction, such as fisheries, to the services that ecosystems provide, such as climate regulation. For a related paper, Roman will examine these changes through the lens of “postindustrial ecology,” the transition from extractive industries to cultural and supporting services, such as ecotourism and environmental stewardship.

Roman has received support from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Duke University Marine Lab, the Fulbright Scholar Program, Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program, among others. His research has appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and elsewhere. A fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment at UVM, Roman is editor ’n’ chef of eattheinvaders.org and the author of Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act (Harvard University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, and Whale (Reaktion Books, 2006). He earned a master’s in wildlife ecology and conservation from the University of Florida and a doctorate in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard.