Richard Primack - Biography#

For the past 45 years, Dr. Richard Primack has been an Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor at Boston University, with sabbatical leaves at Harvard University, the University of Tokyo, and the Sarawak Forest Department. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, the Northwest Forestry University in China, and Charles University in the Czech Republic.

During the past 20 years, the major focus of his research has been monitoring the impacts of climate change on the phenology of wildflowers, trees, birds and insects, building on historical observations and museum specimens. As part of this work, his lab has developed many novel research techniques which have been widely adopted around the world.

Dr. Primack is the author of four widely-used conservation biology textbooks, which have been translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (four editions), Czech (two editions), Estonian, French (two editions, one for Madagascar), Greek (two editions), German, Hungarian, Italian (two editions), Indonesian (two editions), Japanese (two editions), Korean (three editions), Mongolian, Nepali, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian (two editions), Russian, South Asia (in English), Serbian, Spanish (one for Spain and two for Latin America), Turkish, and Vietnamese. In these translations, local examples were added by in-country co-authors. A free African edition, published online in 2019, has been downloaded over 50,000 times.

Dr. Primack was Editor-in-Chief of Biological Conservation from 2009-2016, handling 17,000 manuscripts, of which 3,000 were published following peer-review. He supervised a team of 10 editors and organized 15 special issues.

Over the past 10 years, Dr. Primack organized several networks of botanical gardens in the United States, China, Canada, and many European countries to monitor over 1,500 species of woody plants for timing of leaf out, leaf senescence, and fruit maturation.