Rajeev Raghavan

Dr. Rajeev completed his BSc and MSc degrees in Aquaculture from the Mahatma Gandhi University of Madras, and a PhD in Fish Ecology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Subsequently, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at Universities in Belgium (Hasselt University), Czech Republic (University of South Bohemia) and China (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Dr. Rajeev has also received the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar award three times and held Visiting Professorships at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany), where he developed and administered courses in freshwater biodiversity for students of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Programs. 

Rajeev’s broad research interest is in aquatic conservation, and works on multiple disciplines from systematics, molecular ecology, biogeography and freshwater fisheries. Dr. Rajeev is globally recognized for his work on freshwater fish taxonomy and conservation in the South Asian region. He has described more than 25 new species, 5 new genera and 2 new families of fish from the Indian subcontinent. Since 2012, Rajeev has also worked on the science-policy interface through his association with the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and various other knowledge products of IUCN.

Dr. Rajeev has published more than 200 scientific papers (with >4000 citations and a h-index of 31), and has been listed in the ‘Elsevier-Scopus Top 2% Scientists of the World’ consecutively for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. In honour of his contributions to freshwater fish conservation, two new fish species have been named after Rajeev - Channa rara and Indoreonectes rajeevi. In July 2023, Rajeev was awarded the ‘Fisheries Society of British Isles (FSBI) Medal 2023’, for exceptional contributions to fish biology and fisheries science, becoming the first awardee from the Asian continent.

Publications