Robert Whittaker - Biography#

Professor Robert Whittaker has a BSc in Botany and Geography from the University of Hull (1980), an MSc in Ecology from University College North Wales (1982), and a doctorate from University College Cardiff (1985), where he studied vegetation succession on recently deglaciated terrain, in the Jotunheimen, Norway. He joined the Oxford School of Geography and the Environment in 1986, having previously worked for a year as a research officer at Birkbeck College, London. In 1990 he was appointed to a university lectureship and a fellowship at St Edmund Hall. In 1999 he was awarded the title of Reader and, in 2004, Professor of Biogeography. He became an Emeritus Professor of Biogeography in October 2023 and was also elected as Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

Professor Robert Whittaker has published over 200 peer-review articles and is author or co-author of eight books, including five different titles. He has supervised 18 doctoral students. He was founding Co-Academic Director of the MSc Biodiversity, Conservation and Management, University of Oxford.

Professor Whittaker currently collaborates with several overlapping groups of colleagues principally working on a range of topics in island ecology, evolution and conservation, and on topics in macroecology and diversity theory. In addition to collaborations with colleagues at CMEC in recent years, these collaborations have included various funded programmes focused on: palaeoenvironmental history of Macaronesian islands (collaborators include J.M. Fernández-Palacios and colleagues of the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, and Professor K.J. Willis, University of Oxford); macroecology and island biogeography using the Azores as a model system (collaborators include P.A.V. Borges, F. Rigal & colleagues in the Azorean Biodiversity Group, University of Azores; K.A. Triantis & A. Parmakelis, University of Athens; funding through FCT, Portugal); biogeography of islands group (workshop led by M. Borregaard, University of Copenhagen, and 14 others); productivity–richness relationships (L. Gillman & colleagues, University of Auckland).

He is the editor-in-chief of Frontiers of Biogeography, the scientific magazine of the International Biogeography Society. He served as editor-in-chief of Global Ecology & Biogeography - a journal of macroecology - from 1995 to 2004, and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biogeography, the leading international journal in biogeography from 2004 to 2015. Professor Whittaker is a founding member of the International Biogeography Society, was a Director-at-Large from 2005-2006, and was President of the International Biogeography Society for 2009-2010.

Professor Whittaker was appointed a Full Professor (part time) in the Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen for a fixed term from June 2015 to December 2019. He was admitted as a Fellow of the Society of Biology in September 2011. Rob was elected a foreign member of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa in July 2011, and in July 2022 was made a Distinguished Fellow of the International Biogeography Society in recognition of his contribution to the subject, especially in the fields of island biogeography and the application of biogeography to conservation. He was awarded the Alfred Russel Wallace Award 2023 by the International Biogeography Society in recognition of a career-long contribution to Biogeography.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=jaAUc0wAAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/rwhittaker.html