Dr. Miles Silman is the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Presidential Chair in Conservation Biology at Wake Forest University where he is the Founding Director of the Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability (formerly the Wake Forest Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability (CEES), which he helped found) and Board President of the Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónica (CINCIA—the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation).  He is an ecologist whose basic research interests are in community structure and ecosystem function, and particularly the roles of species interactions structuring the world that we see and inhabit. Dr.Silman has been working in the Western Amazon and Andes of Peru for the last 33 years to study and protect the planet’s last best forests, including the installation of large-scale forest plot networks to understand regional effects of climate change, as well as team-building to focus research on pressing conservation issues.

Dr. Silman’s conservation projects include work on tropical agriculture, soil remediation and reforestation after illegal and artisanal scale mining, monitoring and assessing deforestation, wildlife population biology and the mitigation of wildlife-human conflict, and the generation and application of conservation technology. A major effort has been to put what has been learned about Andean and Amazonian forests to use in private- and public-sector restoration and ecosystem service projects that change land use by generating revenue for conservation while creating economic and social value for people living in the region. Dr. Silman is the Founding Director of the Wake Forest Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability, co-founder of the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG), PI and Board President of the Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónica (CINCIA—the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation), and co-designer of the Wake Forest Master of Arts in Sustainability Graduate Program and the Wake Forest Environment and Sustainability Major.