Madhav Gadgil (born 1942) studied Biology at the Universities of Poona and Mumbai before doing a Ph.D. in the area of Mathematical Ecology at Harvard University. He has been an IBM Fellow of the Computing Centre, Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics and a Lecturer in Biology at Harvard University. Since 1973, he has worked at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where he is currently working as a Professor of Ecological Sciences. He’s also been a Visiting Professor at Stanford and a distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the National Environmental Fellowship in recognition of his field research on ‘people-environment relationship on the hill chain of Western Ghats in India’. He has been active in eco-development oriented participatory research with a number of voluntary organizations. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, Third World Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society.