A.M.J.R's Website

PROFESSIONAL

I am now retired, but if you are interested in my past work, here is a summary.

I trained in forestry at Aberdeen University, during when I took a year off (1968-69) to do Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Nigeria. After leaving Aberdeen, I spent a year doing a diploma in Forestry at Oxford under an U.K. Overseas Development Administration (ODA) studentship, and then worked in 1972 with the Oxford Forestry Institute.

In 1973 I started working on contract for ODA for three years in Nicaragua on a species and provenance trials project, and then went to Honduras for seven years working on a seed project.  During that time I met my wife Gilli, and we left central America with three children. I was then posted to Nepal in 1983 on another seed project. We lived there for four years, and left with four children.

My career took a change when we were posted to Brussels, where I helped to advise the  European Commission on tropical forestry development policy.  We spent three years there.

I was then posted to the Caribbean for five years, based in Barbados, acting as the regional forestry Advisor for the British Development Division in the Caribbean. During that time I was able to visit many of the islands, and also Guyana and Belize on the mainland.

We then returned back to England in 1997, where I was based at the Natural Resources Institute in Chatham, and also worked for several months at the Department for International Development (DFID - orginally ODA) in London. During this time I was made redundant from NRI, and started work as a private consultant based in Oxford. I am now fully retired.