JCU professor heads to Utrecht

James Cook University biologist and tropical forest expert Professor William F Laurance has been elected to an endowed chair at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Laurance will occupy the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation for a period of five years, spending one month a year in Europe. The chair is co-funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Laurance will carry out research on tropical conservation and share his knowledge with European conservationists, students, researchers and policymakers. Laurance is also a research associate with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and has spent a quarter of a century, living and working in the Amazon, the Congo Basin in Africa, New Guinea and Southeast Asia.