Opportunities and Challenges in the Peruvian Amazon in the time of Covid
Devon Graham is a tropical biologist who works primarily in the Peruvian Amazon with Project Amazonas, a Peruvian-American non-profit organization dedicated to conservation, sustainable development, and the improvement of human and environmental health in rural areas of the rainforest state of Loreto, Peru. After completing a masters degree in marine biology in Washington State, he went on to complete a PhD in tropical ecology at the University of Miami, doing his field work in Costa Rica. It was as he was finishing his dissertation, that he visited the Amazon for the first time in 1994 and got hooked.
Graham’s interests include sustainable development, conservation, botany, agriculture and gardening, public health and tropical medicine, ichthyology, ornithology, herpetology, languages and biogeography.
He taught Everglades and Amazon field courses for Florida International University for 20 years, and has led or co-led student courses and faculty seminars for the National Collegiate Honors Council and the Organization for Tropical Studies, as well as hosting numerous academic groups in the Peruvian Amazon.
He is an avid traveler and has lived and/or worked in the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Rwanda, Kenya, Niger, Costa Rica and Peru, where pre-covid, he was spending about 6 months out of each year.