David Lusseau has been appointed Professor at DTU. He is a sustainability scientist interested in sustainable exploitation of marine wildlife
DTU has appointed David Lusseau Professor of Marine sustainability. Before coming to DTU, David Lusseau was Professor of Behavioural Biology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He works across life, social, and formal sciences with an aim to advance sustainability science, enable transitions to sustainable blue economies, and help with the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Much of this work focusses on estimating and modelling the ways by which human activities interacts with wildlife and finding ways to ensure these activities can flourish without damaging biodiversity. A common thread has been developing methods to estimate the consequences of cumulative exposure to multiple stressors for marine mammal populations and help manage marine sectors, like recreation and tourism, sustainably.
In addition to bringing his research and advisory experience to DTU, David Lusseau is also a committed teacher having developed and led MSc and BSc programmes at Aberdeen and taught across a wide range of disciplines. He looks forward to contributing to teaching at all levels.
David Lusseau provides regularly international and national advice on ways to manage the exploitation of wildlife. He currently convenes the marine mammal chapter of the 2nd World Ocean Assessment for the United Nations and participates to the Washington State Academy of Sciences committee for underwater acoustics and disturbance to provide science to define new regulations for vessel traffic around Southern Resident killer whales.
David Lusseau obtained a BSc in marine biology at the Florida Institute of Technology in 1996 with broad training across the liberal arts and sciences. He then obtained a PhD in Zoology at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand) in 2003 where he had the opportunity to be supervised across the Zoology and Tourism departments. After a first postdoctoral position at the University of Aberdeen’s Lighthouse Field Station, he received a Killam postdoctoral fellowship to spend two years at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) to research social complexity and complex adaptive system dynamics with a focus on cooperation and group consensus decision-making. He then returned to Aberdeen at the end of 2007 to start a lectureship in marine populations where he has been since then.
At DTU he will be organizationally attached to DTU Aqua, Section for Ecosystem based Marine Management. He looks forward to building new collaborations within the section as well as across DTU.