Russell Alan Mittermeier (born November 8, 1949) is a primatologist and herpetologist. He has written several books for both popular and scientist audiences, and has authored more than 300 scientific papers. Biography Russell A. Mittermeier is Chief Conservation Officer of Re:wild (formerly Global Wildlife Conservation). He served as President of Conservation International from 1989 to 2014, then Executive Vice-Chair from 2014 to 2017. He specialises in the fields of primatology, herpetology, biodiversity and conservation of tropical forests. He has undertaken research in more than 30 countries, including Amazonia (particularly Brazil and Suriname) and Madagascar. Since 1977, Mittermeier has served as Chairman of the IUCN-World Conservation Union Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group, and he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Species Survival Commission since 1982. Before working for Conservation International, he spent 11 years at the World Wildlife Fund in the United States, starting as Director of their Primate Program and ending up as Vice-President for Science. He also served as an IUCN-World Conservation Union Regional Councillor for the period 2004–2012, was elected as one of IUCN-World Conservation Union's four Vice-Presidents for the period 2009–2012, and then was elected a lifetime Honorary IUCN-World Conservation Union Member in 2012. He also chaired the first World Bank Task Force on Biodiversity in 1988, which was instrumental in introducing the term "biodiversity" to that institution. He became an adjunct professor at the Stony Brook University in 1978, a research associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for more than two decades, and has been President of the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation since 1996. More recently, he was instrumental in the creation of the 25 million Euro Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, a new species-focused fund based in Abu Dhabi, and serves as a member of its Advisory Committee. In the late 1970s, Mittermeier undertook one of the first studies of the critically endangered northern muriqui woolly spider monkeys in what would become the Caratinga Biological Station. Mittermeier has been particularly interested in the discovery and description of species new to science. He has described a total of 14 new species (three turtles, four lemurs, an African monkey, and six Amazonian monkeys) and has eight species named in his honor (three frogs, a lizard, two lemurs, a monkey, and an ant). The most recent (2014) of these is Mittermeier's saki, Pithecia mittermeieri, a monkey from the