Rauri C.K. Bowie
Principal Investigator
Rauri Bowie is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and a Curator in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2003. He then spent a year at the Field Museum in Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow before returning to South Africa to begin a faculty position at Stellenbosch University, in the heart of South Africa’s wine country. He returned to the US in 2006 to join the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.
For as long as he can remember, he has been fascinated by why animals are distributed unevenly around the globe. Much of his research has centered on documenting and studying patterns of species diversity and distribution across heterogeneous landscapes, particularly those inherent to mountains, arid savannas, and rocky shores. The bulk of his research takes place in Africa but over the past decade has expanded to other continents to ask questions about the global diversification of birds.
Rauri is passionate about teaching field classes, having witnessed firsthand their far-reaching benefits as one of the earliest varieties of ‘flipped classrooms.’ Rauri has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, was awarded UC Berkeley’s most prestigious teaching award in 2013, and is a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the American Ornithologists Society and the International Ornithologists Union. He has been an Editor of Ibis, the British Journal of Ornithology, since 2006.