Peter Houlihan

Peter Houlihan specializes in planning and leading expeditions comprised of local scientists and communities in understudied and threatened rainforests all over the world for conservation, regularly operating in more than 20 countries across Africa, the Americas, and Asia. He has lived and worked extensively throughout the tropics, where he has led nearly 50 large scale expeditions and managed long term conservation programs, particularly in Borneo, Madagascar, the Amazon, Central America, and the Congo Basin. A tropical ecologist and conservation scientist by training, Peter’s research on rainforests has spanned butterfly community ecology, primate behavior, insect genomics, forest canopies, pollination ecology, and biodiversity monitoring. In addition to instructing graduate field courses for Johns Hopkins, Houlihan is a Senior Research Fellow with UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research, a frequent visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, International Advisor for the Borneo Nature Foundation, and he is the Technical Lead of the Rainforest XPRIZE.

Globally, Peter’s research, conservation work, and science communication have helped lead to the establishment of new protected areas and the documentation of species new to science. As a multilingual photographer, videographer, and producer, Peter fuses conservation science with high-impact media to inform broad international audiences about our planet. On camera, Peter has appeared alongside Sir David Attenborough in a BAFTA-nominated series for the BBC, across National Geographic platforms, and in an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, among others. Peter is also a National Geographic Explorer, Photographer with National Geographic Image Collection, National Geographic Expeditions Expert, a Fellow of the Explorers Club, and a gear tester for Patagonia. His personal website can be found here.