About Brian

Brian was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe and spent most of his free time exploring Africa and building various devices to keep the menagerie of pythons, air-breathing catfish, crabs, tortoises and flap-necked chamelions frogs that he caught on his mini-expeditions. Eventually he settled on fish as his preferred quarry and decided to be an ichthyologist so that he could "go fishing every day for the rest of his life and get paid for it". He drove his mum mad by building eight fishponds in the garden and lined his room with as many aquariums which housed his fish frog and snake collection, and when he wasn't catching things he was drawing them.

As he learned more about ecology and how interconnected all the systems were he diversified into birdwatching, mammalian ecology, entomology and even botany, all the while becomming a passionate conservationist and discovering his heros - Attenborough, Mayer, Wilson and Darwin. While doing his Master's degree in fisheries biology at the University of Zimbabwe, Brian was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University - probably the most prestigeous scholarship in the world. With just a few month's notice, he finished his Masters up in record time and left Zimbabwe for the refined, misty cloisters of Oxford. He was initially encouraged to work on the responses of aphids in Whytham woods in relation to climate change issues, but decided instead to try his hand at marine biology. He cobbled together enough money to head out to the the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean to work on coral reef fishes and tropical habitats which was a dream come true.

Four years later with a Doctoral degree from Oxford in hand, Brian looked back at the ruins of Zimbabwe which was suffering at the hands of a rogue dictatorship and decided to move to Washington D.C. which appeared to be the centre of the world for conservation. He knocked on lots of doors, volunteered at the Amazonia exhibit at the National Zoo, met some of the world's most reknowned conservation biologists and wrote some fish pieces of Conservation International's Hotspot Revisited book before being offered a position with Save The Tiger Fund, which began a whole new chapter of conservation grant-making in Asia.