Anders Rhodin

Anders G.J. Rhodin, is a retired orthopedic surgeon as well as a turtle researcher and conservationist. Born in Sweden, he immigrated to the USA in 1958, received a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1971, an M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1977, did orthopedic surgical residency training at Yale, and was in private orthopedic surgical practice in Massachusetts from 1982 to 2019. He is now retired from his medical practice and lives in Vermont with his wife, Carol Conroy. He has been doing research on turtles since 1972, initially as an Associate in Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and currently has over 300 turtle-focused scientific publications. He has described seven new species of turtles, including four with Russ Mittermeier. He is the Founder and Director of Chelonian Research Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit organization established in 1992 for the production, publication, and support of worldwide turtle and tortoise research. He is Founding Editor and Publisher of Chelonian Conservation and Biology, a peer-reviewed leading scientific journal devoted exclusively to turtles and tortoises inaugurated in 1993, and Chelonian Research Monographs, a book-length series focused on turtle and tortoise research and conservation established in 1996. Since 2017, both of these publications have been co-published with the Turtle Conservancy. He was Co-Chair with John Behler and then Chair of the IUCN SSC Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group (TFTSG) from 2000 to 2012, and is currently Executive Vice Chair and co-Red List Coordinator. He was a Steering Committee member of the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) from 2008 to 2012. He was awarded the Sir Peter Scott Award for Conservation Merit by the SSC in 2012, the Behler Turtle Conservation Award by the Turtle Survival Alliance and the TFTSG also in 2012, a Desert Tortoise Council Conservation Award in 2019, and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sea Turtle Society in 2024. He served as Board Chair of the Turtle Conservancy from 2016 to 2024 and is currently Vice Chair. He is the Founding and current Co-Chair of three turtle-focused philanthropic funds: the Turtle Conservation Fund (established 2002), the Congdon-Dickson Turtle Ecology Fund (established 2020), and the Turtle Taxonomy Fund (established 2021), all operating at least partially under the financial umbrella of Chelonian Research Foundation. He has been an Advisory Board member of the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund since 2012 and the Fonseca Species Conservation Fund at Re:wild since 2024. He is also a founding Board Member of Turtle Survival Alliance and African Aquatic Conservation Fund, as well as a founder and senior lead author of the Turtle Taxonomy Working Group that produces the seminal multi-edition monographs on Turtles of the World: Annotated Checklist and Atlas, co-published by Chelonian Research Foundation and Turtle Conservancy.