Juan Jose Alava

Juan Jose Alava is a Biologist who graduated from the Universidad de Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1996. In the 1990s, during his undergraduate studies, he got deeply involved with research and conservation of marine mammals, Neotropical birds, and sea turtles as well as the identification of tropical parasites. During the mid-1990s, he started working as a Microbiology Research Assistant at the National Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of Ecuador and as a Wildlife Biologist specialized in environmental impact assessments at the Center of Environmental Studies (CEMA, Centro de Estudios de Medio Ambiente de la ESPOL, Guayaquil, Ecuador) for several years (1995–2002). He was also an instructor of zoology and ecological projects at the undergraduate level at the Escuela de Ecoturismo, Universidad Cristiana Latino Americana, Ecuador. He received his Master degree (Master of Earth and Environmental Resource Management), under a Fulbright Scholarship, from the School of Ocean, Earth, and Environment, College of Art and Sciences, University of South Carolina,Columbia USA. He received the Ph.D. degree (specialized in environmental toxicology and environmental resource management) from the School of Resource and Environmental Management (REM School), Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University (SFU), British Columbia, Canada, in 2011. His Ph.D. dissertation was focused on ecotoxicology regarding the baseline levels, biomagnification, and health effects of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in endangered Galapagos sea lion pups of the Galapagos Islands and food web bioaccumulation modeling in threatened marine mammals (killer whales, Steller sea lions) from British Columbia. He has served as an instructor for Population Dynamics, Global Changes, Applied Ecology and Sustainable Environments, and Chemical Pesticides and the Environment at SFU. He is also an Associate Faculty Member at Royal Roads University (Victoria, BC, Canada), where he was an instructor for Environmental Chemistry. Among other research and work activities, he is an ongoing collaborating Scientist of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands, the Science Director of the Ecuadorian Foundation for the Study of Marine Mammals (FEMM) in Ecuador and provide temporal services as a research associate with the Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS), Department of Fisheries and Ocean, Canada (DFO).

Juan Jose Alava

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