Human activities have caused the earth’s physical and biological processes to change so significantly that we increasingly think of it as having entered a new geological epoch – the ‘Anthropocene’.

Professor Chris Thomas will give an ecologist’s view of how evolutionary changes in the world’s biodiversity relates to the impact of human activity such as agriculture, hunting, habitation, ecosystem change, and species translocations.

Our speaker, Professor Chris Thomas, is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (LCAB) at the University of York, which examines how the relationship between humanity and the natural world is changing, and how we might develop and maintain a sustainable Earth.

Chris was interested in natural history from a young age and conducted a PhD on insect evolution in the US and Costa Rica. He subsequently worked on biological invasions in New Zealand, then returned to a postdoc at Imperial College in the UK, followed by academic positions in Birmingham and Leeds, arriving in York in 2004. Chris is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and former President of the Royal Entomological Society.

His enthusiasm for LCAB stems from a longstanding desire to understand how the biological world works, how humans have re-shaped the world, and what our future options might be.