Todd L Capson

Dr. Todd Capson has twenty-six years combined experience in West Africa and Latin America building and managing programs to address the impacts of climate change on the oceans, to create marine protected areas, and to build scientific capacity. He is currently a Fulbright Specialist and a Research Associate of the Paris Institute of Global Physics where he works to understand and address the impacts of climate change on West African oceans. As a AAAS Diplomacy Fellow at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Marine Conservation, he led the office’s international shark conservation program and served on the Interagency Working Group on Ocean Acidification. Through the State Department’s U.S. Speaker Program, he has lectured on climate change impacts on the oceans in Indonesia, New Zealand, Mauritius, and Senegal. At the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he led efforts to protect Panama’s Coiba National Park, resulting in national legislation for its protection and its addition to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. He also led in Panama a U.S. Government-supported team to discover medicines from tropical ecosystems. He supervised three Masters-level students as an Adjunct Professor of McGill University and has worked as a consultant to various non-profit organizations. He received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Utah and was an NIH post-doctoral fellow at Penn State University. He has authored or co-authored five book chapters and 41 peer-reviewed articles. He is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa, where he works with the Two Oceans Aquarium Education Foundation.