Anders G.J. Rhodin, M.D., is both an orthopedic surgeon and a renowned turtle researcher and conservationist. Born in Sweden, he immigrated to the United States in 1958, received a B.A. from Dartmouth in 1971, and an M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1977. He completed his orthopedic surgical residency training at Yale and was in private medical practice in Massachusetts from 1982 to 2019. He has been conducting research on turtles since 1972, initially at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and has over 300 publications to his name. He has described six new species of turtles, including three with Russ Mittermeier, Chief Conservation Officer of Re:wild and fellow TSA Board member.
Anders is the Founder and Director of Chelonian Research Foundation and Founding Editor and Publisher of Chelonian Conservation and Biology. Since 2017, both of these publications have been co-published with the Turtle Conservancy. Anders was Co-Chair or Chair of the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group (TFTSG) from 2000 to 2012, and is currently Executive Vice Chair.
In 2012, he received the Sir Peter Scott Award for Conservation Merit from the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Behler Turtle Conservation Award from the TFTSG and Turtle Survival Alliance. He is Chair Emeritus of the Turtle Conservancy and Founding Co-Chair of Turtle Conservation Fund, Turtle Taxonomy Fund, and Congdon-Dickson Turtle Ecology Fund, as well as a Founding Board Member of Turtle Survival Alliance and African Aquatic Conservation Fund. He is also a co-founder and leader of the Turtle Taxonomy Working Group of the TFTSG that publishes the multi-edition reference on Turtles of the World: Annotated Checklist and Atlas. He is now retired and lives in Vermont with his wife, Carol Conroy.