11 Facts About Rohan Pethiyagoda

Rohan David Pethiyagoda is a Sri Lankan biodiversity scientist, amphibian and freshwater-fish taxonomist, author, conservationist and public-policy advocate.

From 1981 to 1982 Pethiyagoda served as an engineer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health, and from 1982 to 1987 as director of that institution.

Rohan Pethiyagoda served as Advisor on Environment and Natural resources to the Government of Sri Lanka from 2002 to 2004 and was in 2005 elected Deputy Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

In 2008 Rohan Pethiyagoda was elected to the board of trustees of the International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, having previously served a four-year term as Deputy Chair of the Assurance Group of the British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership.

On 22 June 2022, Rohan Pethiyagoda was appointed Senior Policy Adviser to Sajith Premadasa, MP, Leader of the Opposition of Sri Lanka.

Rohan Pethiyagoda resigned from government office in 1987 to commence work on a project to explore the island's freshwater fishes, which led to his first book in 1990, Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka, an illustrated account of the country's freshwater-fish fauna.

Rohan Pethiyagoda diverted the profits from this book to an endowment for the Wildlife Heritage Trust, a foundation he established in 1990 to further biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka, with the business model of publishing natural history books and channelling the proceeds into further exploration and research.

In 1998, concerned by the rapid loss of montane forest in Sri Lanka, Rohan Pethiyagoda began a project to convert abandoned tea plantations into natural forest, for which he was honoured by the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

In recognition of his contribution to biodiversity conservation Rohan Pethiyagoda was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka.

Rohan Pethiyagoda is a research associate of the Australian Museum and serves as editor for Asian Freshwater Fishes of the journal Zootaxa.

Rohan Pethiyagoda named the freshwater cyprinid genus Haludaria after the Begali youth known only as Haludar, who illustrated the fishes depicted in Francis Hamilton's "Fishes of the Ganges", the founder work of Indian ichthyology.