Colin Chapman

Colin Chapman received his joint Ph.D. in the Departments of Anthropology and Zoology at the University of Alberta, then did post-docs at McGill and Harvard Universities. Since 1990 he has served as an Honourary lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Makerere University. Colin also served as a faculty member in Zoology at the University of Florida for 11 years and returned to McGill in 2004 where he held a Canada Research Chair Tier 1 position in Primate Ecology and Conservation. He is a Killam Research Fellow and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2018 he was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and an Office of an Academician, Northwest University, Xi’an, China. In 2019 he took up a position at George Washington University to allow more time for conservation efforts and in 2022 he shifted to Vancouver Island University to be closer to nature and to allow him to devote more time to being a board member of African Wildlife Foundation and a scientific advisor to the Uganda Wildlife Foundation.

For the last 34+ years, Dr. Chapman has conducted research in Kibale National Park, Uganda concentrating on understanding the roles of disease, nutrition, and stress in determining primate abundance and how best to conserve the world’s biodiversity. During this time, he has not just been an academic, but has devoted great effort to help the rural communities, establishing schools, clinics, a mobile clinic, and ecotourism projects focused on chimpanzees and crater lakes. His efforts with respect to the union of the provision of health care and conservation resulted in him being awarded the Velan Foundation Awardee for Humanitarian Service in 2017.