Roger Payne

 Roger Payne, Bio 

Roger Payne (AB, 1956, Harvard Univ.; PhD, 1961, Cornell Univ.) His PhD dissertation demonstrated that Barn owls are capable of locating prey in total darkness based only on hearing. He has spent 55 years studying whales and working for their conservation. He is best known for co-discovering humpback whale song, and for his mathematical demonstration that before the oceans were polluted by ships' traffic noise, fin and blue whale sounds were audible across oceans (later confirmed by Christopher Clark). He was an Assistant Professor at Tufts University for 6 years, followed by an 18 year joint appointment (Rockefeller University, 51%; Wildlife Conservation Society 49%). In 1983 he left academia to run Ocean Alliance the institute he founded in 1970. 

He pioneered many of the benign research techniques now used in over 80 countries to study whales; he trained many current US and foreign whale research leaders. He founded the longest continuous study of known-individual, baleen whales (3800+ Southern right whales). He has led 100+ expeditions to all oceans, and studied the behavior of every baleen whale species. His institute circumnavigated the world, returning with biopsy samples from 955 sperm whales; thereby providing the first global, baseline measurements of toxic metals, synthetic contaminants and brominated flame-retardants in a marine species. Throughout his career he has worked to promote the conservation of whales hand in hand with a series of international organizations both in the US and elsewhere and co-established two of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries for whales.

He is currently working with the CETI Project: an effort to translate sperm-whale-speak with the ultimate goal of communicating directly with a whale. The CETI Project received one of the Audacious Grants sponsored by the TED Foundation Institute.

Payne has served on many boards but is currently on the boards of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Friends of Toki, and OneWhale.

Payne's many honors and awards include: a knighthood in the Netherlands; a MacArthur Fellowship; a WWF Member of Honor; a UNEP Global 500 Award: and Oxford University’s Dawkins Prize.