peoplepill id: richard-laws
RL
United Kingdom Great Britain England
1 views today
1 views this week
Richard Laws
English mammalogist and Antarctic scientist; 2nd Director BAS

Richard Laws

The basics

Quick Facts

Intro
English mammalogist and Antarctic scientist; 2nd Director BAS
Work field
Gender
Male
Place of birth
Whitley Bay, United Kingdom
Age
88 years
Education
St Catharine's College, Cambridge
Awards
Fellow of the Royal Society
 
The details (from wikipedia)

Biography

Richard Maitland Laws CBE FRS ScD (23 April 1926 – 7 October 2014) was Director of the British Antarctic Survey from 1973 to 1987; Master of St Edmund's College, Cambridge from 1985 to 1996 and Secretary of the Zoological Society of London.

Education and early life

Laws was born in Whitley Bay, Northumberland and educated at Dame Allan's School, Newcastle upon Tyne and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was an Open Scholar.

Career

Laws started his career as a zoologist on the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in 1947, where he investigated the ecology of elephant seals in the South Orkney Islands and South Georgia. These formed the subject of his 1953 Cambridge PhD. After spending a season as a whaling inspector, he joined the national Institute of Oceanography (1955–61) where he studied great whales and elephant seals.

Outside Antarctica, he was also an expert on the large African mammals. In 1960, he was appointed Director of the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology in Uganda. Over the next eight years, his research focused on hippopotamus and elephant ecology. Laws spent a year as Director of the Tsavo Research Project in Kenya (1967–68). Needing data from 300 dead elephants, Laws' research at Tsavo involved the slaughter of 300 wild elephants, which were taken from one herd. He then asked for a similar number to be killed in each of the nine remaining Tsavo herds. Protests led by David Sheldrik resulted in the denial of this request and the subsequent winding up Laws' research.

Laws returned to Cambridge in 1968 to resume his Antarctic research. In 1969, he became Head of the Life Sciences Division of the British Antarctic Survey. He succeeded Vivian Fuchs as BAS Director in 1973, a post he held until retirement in May 1987.

He was Master of St Edmund's College, Cambridge from 1985 until 1996. He was a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission.

Awards and honours

In 1954, Laws won the Bruce memorial prize for his work on the ecology of elephant seals. He was awarded the Polar Medal in 1975.

Laws was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1980, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1991, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Bath.

Laws prize

On his retirement, a fund was established for a prize to be awarded in recognition of the achievements of outstanding young scientists of the Survey. The Laws Prize continues to be awarded annually, with the fund administered by the BAS Club.

The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Lists
Richard Laws is in following lists
comments so far.
Comments
From our partners
Sponsored
Credits
References and sources
Richard Laws
arrow-left arrow-right instagram whatsapp myspace quora soundcloud spotify tumblr vk website youtube pandora tunein iheart itunes