Alex Bond


Alexander L. Bond is a Canadian conservation biologist, ecologist, and curator. He is a senior curator at the Natural History Museum at Tring and a researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

Education

Bond completed a B.Sc. with honors in biology from Mount Allison University in 2005 and published a thesis titled Daytime spring migrations of scoters in the Bay of Fundy. He earned an M.Sc. from University of New Brunswick in 2007. His thesis was entitled Patterns of mercury burden in the seabird community of Machias Seal Island, New Brunswick. Bond completed a Ph.D. in 2011 at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His thesis there was called Relationships between oceanography and the demography & foraging of auklets in the Aleutian Islands. He was a NSERC Visiting Fellow in Government Laboratories, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada from 2013 – 2014 and a NSERC post-doctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan from 2011 to 2013.

Career

Bond is a conservation biologist with a focus on the marine environment and island biology. His current specialisations include conservation, contaminants, invasive species, plastic, seabirds and stable isotopes. He was a NSERC visiting fellow at Environment and Climate Change Canada from 2013 to 2014. From 2014 to 2017, he was a senior conservation scientist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds at the Centre for Conservation Science. Bond was an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan School of Environment and Sustainability from 2014 to 2019. He is an honorary researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and is a primary research member of the Adrift Lab, both based in Tasmania, Australia. Bond is a senior curator of birds in the department of life sciences at the Natural History Museum at Tring.
Since 2012, Bond is a subject editor of Avian Conservation and Ecology.
Since 2013, Bond has written and blogged on science and Queer in STEM topics using the name The Lab and Field; he also uses this name on Twitter. He is part of the 500 Queer Scientists campaign, and co-founder and administrator of LGBTQ+ STEM. In 2020, he took part in the inaugural QatCanSTEM colloquium at Dalhousie University in Canada.
Bond is most noted for his work on plastic pollution in oceans and especially the health effects on seabirds.

Personal life

Due to being gay, Bond and his partner decided to not pursue graduate school or positions located in the United States, opting instead for Canada or the United Kingdom.