Joe Roman

Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and author of the books Whale, the role of cetaceans in the nitrogen cycle, the relationship between biodiversity and disease, and the genetics of invasions. He is the founding editor of "Eat the Invaders", a website dedicated to controlling invasive species by eating them.

Roman is a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont. He earned an AB with Honors in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University in 1985 and an MA in wildlife ecology and conservation from the University of Florida. During his PhD, he co-authored, with Stephen Palumbi, a paper for the journal Science that presented evidence that whale populations had been considerably larger prior to whaling than had previously been thought. He had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil in 2012, and he was the 2014–15 Sarah and Daniel Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology at Harvard. Born in Queens, New York, Roman lives in Vermont.

Books Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World (2023, Little, Brown Spark) Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act (2011, Harvard University Press) Whale (2006, Reaktion Books) His book Listed won the 2012 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Journal articles

Popular articles "America's New Whale Is Now at Extinction's Doorstep." The New York Times, March 6, 2021. "Vulnerable Species in the Crosshairs," with Ya-Wei Li, The New York Times, July 26, 2018. "Can the Plover Save New York?" Slate, August 23, 2013. "Sharks Help Maintain Health of the Oceans," Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2005. "Where Bright Lights and Night Life Are Nature's Doing." The Sunday New York Times, March 6, 2005. "A Place Where All the Snowflakes Are Still Different." The New York Times, January 2, 2004.