Professor Mundanthra Balakrishnan has over 44 years of theoretical and practical experience in the field of animal behaviour, wildlife ecology and conservation biology. He has his Ph.D. degree in ethology, awarded by the University of Kerala in 1976. He has worked on the scientific staff of the Division of Wildlife of the Kerala Forest Research Institute for over two years and then joined the University of Kerala as a Lecturer, where he retired as Professor of Zoology in 2006. In between, he had advanced training  from the Institute of Evolutionary Animal Morphology & Ecology, USSR, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and also worked as an Associate Professor, dealing with tropical ecology in the Norwegian Centre for International Agricultural Development (NORAGRIC) of the then Norwegian University of Agricultural Sciences (currently The Norwegian University of Life Sciences). Since 2002, Prof. Balakrishnan is working as Professor of Zoological Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, where he is responsible for teaching and advising students in areas of ecology, ethology, biodiversity and conservation biology. Prof. Balakrishnan has also travelled widely and visited a number of universities and research institutions across the world. He has over 120 scientific publications and three other books to his credit.