Richard M. Laws
| Dick Laws | |
|---|---|
| Born | Richard Maitland Laws 23 April 1926 Whitley Bay |
| Died | 7 October 2014 (aged 88) |
| Fields | Marine biology |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Notable awards |
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Richard Maitland Laws CBE FRS ScD (23 April 1926 – 7 October 2014) was Director of the British Antarctic Survey from 1973–1987; Master of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge from 1985–1996 and Secretary of the Zoological Society of London.
Laws was born in Whitley Bay, Northumberland and educated at the University of Cambridge.
Laws started his career as a zoologist on the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in 1947, where he investigated the ecology of elephant seals in the South Orkney Islands and South Georgia. These formed the subject of his 1953 Cambridge PhD. After spending a season as a whaling inspector, he joined the national Institute of Oceanography (1955–61) where he studied great whales and elephant seals.
Outside Antarctica, he was also an expert on the large African mammals. In 1960, he was appointed Director of the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology in Uganda. Over the next eight years, his research focused on hippopotamus and elephant ecology. Dr Laws spent a year as Director of the Tsavo Research Project in Kenya (1967–68). Needing data from 300 dead elephants, Dr Laws' research at Tsavo involved the slaughter of 300 wild elephants.
Laws returned to Cambridge in 1968 to resume his Antarctic research. In 1969, he became Head of the Life Sciences Division of the British Antarctic Survey. He succeeded Vivian Fuchs as BAS Director in 1973, a post he held until retirement in May 1987.
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