Dr Jen Smart
Chair
Species conservation is at the heart of everything I do and I am particularly keen on waders. For the last 14 years I have worked for the RSPB where as a scientist, I was trying to figure out what we could do to reverse the declines of waders breeding in wetlands. I am now the Head of Species for RSPB England which involves me ensuring that our dedicated teams working at the forefront of conservation are doing the right things for our priority species focused on the most important places for those species. I have been working with the BOU for 7 years where I currently chair the Ibis Management Committee and sit on Council and I love the open and friendly feeling of being part of the ornithology community that is the BOU. When not working I am either out on my bike, enjoying my dogs or visiting friends and family.
Follow Jen on Twitter @drredshank
Graham Appleton
Honorary Treasurer
Graham has been the BOU’s Honorary Treasurer since 2017, having been recruited as a Trustee the year before. He had two careers, firstly as a Maths teacher and Deputy Headmaster and latterly as a fundraiser and Director of Communications for the British Trust for Ornithology. While teaching he was the Treasurer of the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club and a Trustee of the BTO. More recently he has been a school governor, chairing the finance committee, and is a Pension Fund Trustee. Graham started doing BTO surveys nearly 50 years ago but his main ornithological focus is on waders, undertaking fieldwork in Iceland and the UK. He has written hundreds of articles for Shooting Times and writes his own WaderTales blog series, translating scientific research about shorebirds into stories that appeal to birdwatchers.
Follow Graham on Twitter @ grahamfappleton
Prof Rauri Bowie
Editor
Rauri is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and a Curator in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his PhD from the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2003. He is an evolutionary biologist who is fascinated by why animals are distributed unevenly around the globe. Much of his research has centered on documenting and studying patterns of species diversity and distribution across heterogeneous landscapes, particularly those inherent to mountains and arid savannas. The bulk of his research takes place in Africa but over the past decade has expanded to other continents to ask questions about the global diversification of birds. His favorite groups of birds are sunbirds. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, was awarded UC Berkeley’s most prestigious teaching award, and is a fellow of the Californian Academy of Sciences, the American Ornithologists Society, and the International Ornithologists Union. He has been an editor of Ibis since 2006.
Richard Broughton, MSc
Associate Editor 
Richard has a Masters degree in GIS (Geographical Information Systems) from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD from Bournemouth University in Marsh Tit ecology and habitat modelling. He is an ecologist and GIS specialist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology since 1999, working on a variety of farmland, woodland and ecotoxicology projects. With a particular interest in forest birds, mammals and habitats, he runs a long-term population study of Marsh Tits in eastern England (Monks Wood), and collaborates on a Willow Tit project in northwest England, investigating the species’ rapid declines. He’s also involved with Wood Warbler research in Poland’s Białowieża primeval forest. His other interests include the use of remote sensing data (such as lidar) in ecological research, interactions between species (such as birds and invasive Grey Squirrels) and pesticide contamination of raptors. Richard is a regular attendee at BOU conferences and joined the IBIS Management Committee in 2020.
Follow Richard on Twitter @woodlandbirder
Dr Dan Chamberlain
Editor
Dan is currently an Associate Professor in Animal Ecology at the University of Turin, Italy. Following a DPhil on Blackbird ecology at the Edward Grey Institute, Oxford, Dan spent sixteen years working for the British Trust for Ornithology, most recently as the Principal Ecologist for Climate Change and head of Population Ecology and Modelling. Over 25 years’ post-doctoral experience has produced a large body of work on the ecology of birds in highly modified habitats, specifically farmland and urban areas. His current research is focussed on impacts of environmental change on biodiversity in alpine habitats, including birds, carabid beetles and dung beetles.
Follow Dan on Twitter @DanC_eco
Steve Dudley
Chief Operations Officer
Steve has worked in and around ornithology, and in particular science communication, since 1985. He started life as an RSPB reserves engagement officer before moving to the BTO (membership development officer) and then, in 1997, appointed as the BOU’s senior staff member to run the day to day operations of Union.
Steve’s role is very varied and means he has his fingers in most BOU pies, including delivering all BOU conferences and events (including in recent years our series of Twitter conferences), running the business side of the BOU’s journal, IBIS, website development and content management and servicing BOU Council and its five Standing Committees. Steve also undertakes all the BOU’s comms and social media (including the development of the BOU Twitter conferences), and in recent years has been actively involved in researching the ornithological community’s use of social media. With a background in design, in 2019 Steve designed the new Janet Kear Union Medal replacing the BOU’s existing Union Medal which had been in service since 1912.
Steve is an active birder and naturalist and can usually be found wandering the Huntingdonshire fens.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevedudley_
Dr Rosemarie Kentie
Associated Editor 
Rose obtained her PhD at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, on how agricultural intensification affected breeding Black-tailed Godwits. Thereafter she received a Newton International Fellowship and spent two years at the University of Oxford where she studied the combined effects of climate change and habitat quality on timing of breeding and population dynamics of godwits, and how population density affected life history strategies within a population of Soay sheep. Currently she is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and guest researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, where her research is focussed on how Herring Gulls and Lesser Black-backed Gulls react to changing environments. She combines fieldwork in breeding colonies with GPS tracking and diet analyses. In her past and current studies she often works with long-term mark-recapture datasets. After Rose visited her first BOU conference in 2013, she became more and more involved in the society and joined the IBIS Management Committee in 2018 and became an Associated Editor for IBIS in 2019.
Follow Rosemarie on Twitter @RoosKentie
Prof Rebecca Kimball
Editor
Rebecca received a PhD from the University of New Mexico, where her dissertation focused on sexual selection in House Sparrows. After completing postdoctoral work at both the University of New Mexico and The Ohio State University, she became a faculty member at the University of Florida in 2001, where she is now a Professor in the Dept. of Biology. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in the areas of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology. Within these broad areas, she utilizes modern molecular genomic techniques, in combination with other types of data to address questions in: avian phylogenetics, where she has focused on reconstructing the evolutionary history among all birds as well more focused studies in specific orders; the evolution of male secondary sexual traits and display behaviors; the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie evolutionary change in specific traits; mating and social systems within and among species; population and conservation genetics, and more recently evolutionary genomics. She has been an editor of IBIS since 2013.
Angela Langford
Journal Manager
Angela graduated from Hull University with a BSc in Environmental Botany and Geography, went on to do a PGCE and taught Science for a number of years. After starting a family she decided on a change of direction and set up a carnivorous plant nursery and tropical butterfly house in southern Scotland. Still looking for a new challenge she later established a second hand bookshop in Wigtown (Scotland’s National booktown), specialising in natural history. This love of books lead to establishing a publishing business, Langford Press, which concentrated on wildlife art. Living in beautiful Pembrokeshire, Angela spends her spare time walking the coastal path with her dog and enjoying the wonderful wildlife of the area. Angela joined the BOU as a staff member in 2008.
Dr Dominic McCafferty
Editor in Chief 
Dominic was appointed Editor in Chief of IBIS in 2017. He currently works as Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and Associate Lecturer with The Open University. His PhD at the University of Edinburgh was on Barn Owls in south-west Scotland and his current research focuses on cold adaptation and physiological ecology of a range of birds (from passerines to penguins), as well as several mammal species. He is an experienced field biologist having previously worked for the National Trust for Scotland at St Abb’s Head National Nature Reserve and with the British Antarctic Survey on Bird Island (South Georgia). Currently, Dominic is based at the University of Glasgow’s field station: the Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment (SCENE) on Loch Lomondside.
Follow Dominic on Twitter @DomMcCafferty
Dr Ruedi Nager
Editor
Ruedi Nager obtained a PhD on the breeding strategies of Great Tits from the University of Basel (Switzerland). He then spent post-docs with Rudi Drent in Groningen and then Jaques Blondel (Montpellier) studying physiological aspects of breeding in hole-breeders and demographic aspects of the Greater Flamingo (with Tour du Valat, Camargue). In 1996, Ruedi joined the University of Glasgow, first as a post-doctoral research assistant working on the cost of egg production in the Lesser Black-backed Gull, and then appointed a lecturer in 1999. Ruedi’s current main research interests are in seabird ecology and thermal ecology. The seabird work mainly focuses on the trophic and movement ecology of gulls, centred on a colony in the Firth of Clyde that he now studies since 2012. The thermal imaging work focuses on capturing relevant physiological measures that characterise a bird’s interactions with its abiotic and biotic environment non-invasively using infra-red thermal imaging. And there are many other things that catches Ruedi’s curiosity. Ruedi joined the IBIS editorial team in 2009.
Dr Staffan Roos
Associate Editor
Staffan obtained his PhD in 2004 at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences on how nest predators affect the breeding behaviour of Red-backed Shrikes. He has since held various positions at Queen’s University Belfast, the British Trust for Ornithology and the RSPB. In 2018, he moved back to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Staffan’s research is focused on predator-prey interactions, raptors and conflict resolution in conservation. It often incorporates aspects of citizen science. During his seven years in the RSPB, he worked intensively in the Langholm Moor Demonstration Project, which aimed at resolving a long-standing conservation conflict between grouse shooting interests and raptor conservation. He has been an Associate Editor for IBIS since 2015 and a member of the IBIS Management Committee since 2020.
Follow Staffan on Twitter @roos_staffan
Prof Jeremy Wilson
Reviews Editor
Jeremy is Head of Conservation Science for RSPB in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where he is responsible for the strategic development and implementation of RSPB’s science programme in these countries, and in upland and marine environments throughout the UK. He has held an Honorary Chair at the University of Stirling since 2009 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017. He is currently a member of Scottish Natural Heritage’s Scientific Advisory Committee, UK SPA & Ramsar Scientific Working Group, and Scottish Biodiversity Strategy Science Group, and is a Vice-President of the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club. His personal research interests focus on problem-solving science to inform nature conservation, especially understanding the impacts of land management change, on biodiversity in terrestrial environments. He has supervised over 15 PhD students and has published around 160 peer-reviewed papers, research reports, and book chapters, and was lead author of Bird Conservation and Agriculture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. Jeremy joined the IBIS editorial team in 2006.