Doctor Robbie McDonald
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 1995
Subject Area: Science and Engineering
Robbie won a Wingate Scholarship to conduct a PhD on the ecology of stoats and weasels. His work revealed widespread contamination of these small carnivores by anticoagulant rodenticides and the role of changing food supplies resulting from myxomatosis. He also worked extensively with gamekeepers better to understand carnivore population biology and to reveal how changing patterns of predator control could account for declines in stoat and weasel records. Since his time as a Wingate Scholar, Robbie has been a Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow in New Zealand, senior scientist with the Game Conservancy Trust, head of Quercus, Northern Ireland’s biodiversity research centre, editor of Mammal Review, Vice-President of the International Federation of Mammalogists and has recently taken over as head of wildlife disease ecology for Defra’s Central Science Laboratory. He retains a close personal interest in small mammals; He has three small boys. The McDonald family lives in Gloucestershire.