Dr. Thomas Lovejoy was known as the “Godfather of Biodiversity” for coining the term “biological diversity” in the 1980s.

He was a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation in Washington, DC, and a professor at George Mason University. He served as president of the Heinz Center from 2002 to 2008 and held the Biodiversity Chair until 2013. Before this position, Lovejoy was the World Bank’s chief biodiversity advisor and lead specialist for the environment for Latin America and the Caribbean. Spanning the political spectrum, Lovejoy served on science and environmental councils under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. At the core of these many influential positions were Lovejoy’s seminal ideas, which formed and strengthened the field of conservation biology.

In the 1980s, he brought international attention to the world’s tropical rainforests, particularly to the Brazilian Amazon, where he had worked since 1965. He initiated (1979) and led the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project with INPA. Lovejoy also developed the now ubiquitous “debt-for-nature” swap programs and led the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems project. He founded the series Nature, a popular, long-running program on public television.

In 2001, Lovejoy was awarded the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2009, he won a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the ecology and conservation biology category. That same year, he was appointed Conservation Fellow by National Geographic. In 2012, he received the Blue Planet Prize.