Dr Neil Chalmers is Director of the Natural History Museum in London. During his thirteen years in the post he has taken steps to make the Museum's science more accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, including the international research community, politicians and decision-makers and the visiting public.
He is a zoologist, trained at Oxford and Cambridge Universities with a research career in the field of behavioural ecology, based on studies of primates, principally in East Africa and Brazil.
He was a lecturer in Zoology at the University of East Africa, before joining the Open University in 1970. He spent 18 years at the OU and he left his position of Dean of Science for his current job.