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I am a Biologist and Biological Anthropologist at Vancouver Island University with broad interest, but I am foremost a conservation scientist and humanitarian. The focus of my efforts is in and around Kibale National Park, Uganda where I have worked for 34+ years.
I received a joint Ph.D. in Biology and Anthropology at the University of Alberta, and then spent two years at McGill and three years at Harvard University doing post-doctoral research. Since 1990, I served as an Honorary lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda, and since 1995 I have been a Conservation Fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society.
I was a faculty member in Biology at the University of Florida for 11 years. In 2004, I returned to Canada to take up a Canada Research Chair position. Since then, I became a Killam Research Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, received a Velan Foundation Award for Humanitarian Service, and a Konrad Adenauer Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation.
It was a great pleasure and honor to work with the National Geographic Society for nine years helping to guide their grant giving. In 2018, I became a faculty member at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and College of Life Sciences in Northwest University, Xi’an, China.
In 2019, I left McGill and took up a position at George Washington University as being in Washington allowed me to be more engaged in conservation globally. I also became a board member of African Wildlife Foundation. In 2021, I became a fellow of the Wilson Center, a think-tank in Washington, with the goal of trying to understand how to effectively communicate conservation science to the public, practitioners, and policy makers to promote action. The pandemic made me I realize I could work effectively anywhere in world as long as I had internet access, so I moved to Vancouver Island University, so that I could be close to nature every day.
Throughout my career, I have published 550+ articles and have been cited 55000+ times, earning an H factor of 114. My work has been fueled by over $21 million dollars of funding.
I have had the pleasure to conduct research in Kibale National Park, Uganda, for 34+ years, where I focus on the roles that disease, nutrition, stress, and climate change play in determining primate abundance, while also exploring how to best to conserve the world's biodiversity.
One conservation approach that I have found to be especially rewarding is to promote conservation action by helping the local communities around Kibale. Some examples of this approach include building a health and conservation clinic that provides subsidized health care and education to residents, establishing a mobile version of that clinic, helping to build two field stations, and establishing chimpanzee and crater lake ecotourism. I am also passionate about training the next generation of conservation scientists, currently, I am concentrating my training efforts on Ugandan conservation scientists.
Contact me: Colin.Chapman.Research@gmail.com
For more information visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Chapman_(primatologist) / https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=D3Z_4SUAAAAJ&hl=en