Dr. Deborah J. Pain

Dr. Debbie Pain has a first class degree in Environmental Chemistry from London University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. She has worked on lead poisoning for over 30 years. She started working on the biochemistry of lead poisoning in birds in 1983, carrying out her DPhil research in both the UK and with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the USA. She subsequently worked for four years as a research scientist at an independent Biological Research Station in the Camargue, France. During this period she led the IWRB (International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau) task force on Poisoning of Waterfowl by Toxic Lead Shot for the Hunting Impact Research Group, organised the scientific programme for an IWRB lead poisoning workshop (Brussels, 1991) and edited the workshop proceedings (IWRB Spec. Pub.16). She subsequently spent 16 years at RSPB where she ran the International Research Unit. During her career she has worked on a wide range of topics in the UK and overseas including the impacts of a range of environmental contaminants, farming systems and birds, identifying causes of poor conservation status in threatened birds and developing practical conservation solutions. She has more than 100 scientific publications and has co-written/edited three books. Thirty six of her peer-reviewed publications are on contaminants, 26 of these on lead. For the last eight years she has been Director of Conservation at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT).