Gerardo Ceballos

Gerardo Ceballos is an ecologist and conservationist whose work focuses on animal ecology and conservation. He is also a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, recognized for his work on global patterns of distribution of diversity, endemism, and extinction risk in vertebrates. Ceballos has contributed to understanding the magnitude and impacts of the sixth mass extinction, showing that vertebrate species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken more than 10,000 years to do so under the normal extinction rate. His contributions to conservation include promoting the creation of federally protected areas covering almost 2 percent of Mexico. Ceballos is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.