Nathalie Seddon

Tutorial Fellow in Biology

Biography

Professor Nathalie Seddon is Tutorial Fellow in Biology at Wadham College, Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology, NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Oxford Martin School.

Nathalie trained as an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Cambridge University and has over 20 years of field experience working in tropical forests, managing international teams and training students in the UK and abroad. She has published widely on animal communication and the origins and conservation of tropical diversity and has received a number of awards for her work, including a L’Oréal Woman in Science Fellowship and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She was made Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford University in 2015 and has since worked at the interface of science and policy. By training the next generation of decision makers and working closely with NGOs, local governments and the United Nations, her ambition is bring the equitable protection of nature to the centre of the sustainable development agenda.

Research Interests

In her group, the Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Nathalie combines key pure and applied approaches from the natural and social sciences to tackle the challenge of understanding and conserving biodiversity, and building socio-ecological resilience in a warming world. On the pure science side, she uses experimental and comparative approaches to determine the effectiveness of nature-based solutions to climate change and food security. On the applied side, she consolidates and translates ecosystem science for the benefit of decision makers in government and business.

She is a Senior Associate of the International Institute for Environment and Development (London) and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama) and the Centre for Tropical Research (UCLA). Her funding currently comes from the GCRF, NERC and the John Fell Fund. In the recent past she has been supported by the Royal Society, British Ecological Society, EPSRC, European Commission, Wetlands Trust, Rhodes Foundation and the Fulbright Programme.

Selected Publications

For a full list of published peer-reviewed papers, click here.

A list of reports and policy briefs, can be found here.