Juan Carlos Castilla

Juan Carlos Castilla Zenobi (born in Chile, 1940) is a marine biologist. He received his PhD from the University of Wales. Since 1965, he has been a faculty member at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In 1985, he published a paper on a study which focused on a part of the Chilean coastline from which humans had been excluded. He is a recipient of the 1996 TWAS Prize and the 2011 Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology.

Education Castilla was inspired by his marine biology professor, Patricio Sanchez, during his undergraduate years. He and several other students in the class were invited to join Sanchez in studying marine fauna at Chile's seashores. Using the results from this study, Castilla wanted to apply his findings to a real life scenario. With the Chilean government, Castilla implemented "comanagement" sections of the seashore. Castilla collected 3 years of data and found success in areas that were comanaged compared to the all-access areas. This led Castilla and other researchers to lobby the Chilean government into enforcing comanagement on a broader scale.