Timothy C. Bonebrake

Principal Investigator

I'm a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at HKU and the Area of Ecology & Biodiversity. I run the Global Change and Tropical Conservation lab where we are actively addressing research questions on tropical climate change impacts, global change, urban ecology, wildlife trade and endangered species management. I also teach courses at HKU in the Environmental Science and Ecology & Biodiversity curricula, including Conservation Biology and Environmental Data Analysis. I'm a founding member of the Young Academy of Sciences Hong Kong and am currently serving on the Conservation Committee for ATBC and am the chair of the Conservation Committee of WWF HK. I’m on the editorial boards of Ecography, Global Ecology and Biogeography, and the Journal of Insect Conservation. In 2020 I was awarded an Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Since 2021 I’ve served as the Associate Dean (Teaching & Learning) for the Faculty of Science at HKU.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA (North Hollywood and Sunland specifically) I became interested in wildlife at an early age; doing research through high school in a park in East Los Angeles, which later developed into the Audubon Center at Debs Park. I received my BS in Environmental Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley (working in Steve Beissinger's lab) and did my PhD in Biology at Stanford University advised by Carol Boggs and Paul Ehrlich. Following that I did a postdoc at UCLA with Curtis Deutsch studying climate change impacts on species at multiple scales. And just before moving to Hong Kong I conducted postdoctoral research at UC Riverside (advised by Helen Regan and Kurt Anderson) examining the conservation and management of at-risk species in Southern California in the face of urbanization and climate change.