Thomas Brooks
Chief Scientist, Science and Knowledge Unit
Areas of expertise: biodiversity conservation, species extinction, The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, protected areas, ornithology, geography, ecology, evolutionary biology
Language: English
Location: Gland, Switzerland
Contact: press
Thomas Brooks is Head of IUCN’s Science and Knowledge Unit. He is responsible for supporting the scientific underpinning to IUCN’s knowledge products, ensuring IUCN’s scientific engagement in peer biodiversity-science-related networks, and helping to strengthen the culture of science across the union.
Before joining IUCN in January 2013, Tom was Vice President for Science and Chief Scientist of NatureServe and held biodiversity science positions in The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, as well as visiting appointments at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in the University of the Philippines Los Baños and the University of Tasmania. His field experience is primarily from tropical forest hotspots: in Kenya, Paraguay, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Tom is an ornithologist by training, with a B.A. in Geography and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He served on the Executive Committee of the BP Conservation Leadership Programme and co-chaired the IUCN-Rio Tinto Net Positive Impact Protocol & Review Panel Team. He has a long-standing involvement with IUCN, and serves as co-chair of its joint taskforce on ‘Biodiversity and Protected Areas’, the Steering Committee of its Species Survival Commission, and its Red List Committee.
Tom is the author of 198 scientific and popular articles.
Juha Siikamaki
Chief Economist, Economic Knowledge Unit
Photo: Dr. Juha Siikamäki
Areas of expertise: Environmental and natural resource economics
Language: English, Finnish
Location: Washington, DC, United States of America
Contact: press@iucn.org
Juha Siikamaki is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and University of Helsinki. His work focuses primarily on environmental and natural resource economics, but also encompasses forestry, agronomy and ecology.
Throughout his career spanning two decades, Juha has specialised in the economics of ecosystems and nature, including economic valuation of ecosystem services, benefit-cost evaluations of conservation programmes, and spatial targeting of conservation investments. Prior to joining IUCN, Juha worked at Resources for the Future (RFF), a non-partisan research organisation based in Washington, DC as Associate Research Director and Thomas J. Klutznick Senior Fellow. He has also worked at Arcadis, the University of California at Davis and Natural Resources Institute Finland.
Juha’s work includes various regional and global assessments, as well as assessments within countries including the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Finland and Sweden. He is the author of more than 60 publications on general economics, econometrics, conservation and ecosystem services, among other topics.
