Thomas E. Lovejoy III was born in New York City, New York, in 1941. An only child, Lovejoy spent a year-and-a-half on the eastern shore of Maryland out in nature as a young child. His father ran a life insurance company, and his life revolved around that company. When Lovejoy was twelve years old, he first saw a picture of a maloca in the Amazon, which he remembered for the rest of his life. His parents decided it would be good for him to go away for high school, and he attended Millbrook School, about a hundred miles north of New York City. There Lovejoy worked at the zoo to fulfill the community service requirement. His freshman biology teacher, Frank Trevor, inspired Lovejoy’s lifelong interest in biology. He spent his free time exploring the six hundred acres of beautiful countryside the school owned. When it came time to choose a college, Lovejoy selected Yale University, where his father had also attended. He quickly declared his major as biology and began taking as many science classes as he could. During his time at Yale, he took a year off to go on an expedition looking for prehistoric artifacts in Nubia near Aswan, Egypt. When he returned to Yale, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in biology upon graduation. Lovejoy decided to stay at Yale for graduate school because he had a Yale Carnegie teaching fellowship. He co-taught a class on ecology and a class on ornithology. During his Ph.D. program, his former freshman advisor, Phil Humphrey, encouraged Lovejoy to get funding to spend a summer in the Amazon with him banding birds.

That trip transformed Lovejoy’s life, as he would spend the rest of his life studying and visiting the Amazon. He even spent two years living in the Amazon from 1967 to 1969 working on research for his Ph.D. When he returned to the US, he learned more about computers to analyze his dataset and wrote his thesis, which he completed in 1971. Upon graduation, Lovejoy briefly worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before joining the World Wildlife Fund. At first, he mostly reviewed proposals for funding but soon moved into a role that promoted the WWF doing science itself, including through his habitat fragmentation project in Brazil. After a number of years at WWF, Lovejoy moved onto the Smithsonian, managing at first external affairs and later environmental topics. Around this time, he was also asked to serve on George H. W. Bush’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Lovejoy mentions PCAST’s trip to Camp David in detail and discusses fellow members of the group. In 1992, Lovejoy started working for the World Bank, specifically focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. When 9/11 occurred, he was in Australia giving a talk, and it took him about a week to return home to the US. After a brief stint as president of the John Heinz Center, Lovejoy became a professor at George Mason University focused exclusively on graduate students. He concludes with his hopes that science should be viewed as central to every decision in presidential administrations.

This interview was conducted remotely via Zoom.