Rohan Pethiyagoda height - How tall is Rohan Pethiyagoda?

In July 2012 Pethiyagoda and colleagues named a genus of South Asian freshwater fishes Dawkinsia in honour of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, following which Pethiyagoda told AFP that "Richard Dawkins has through his writings helped us understand that the universe is far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than any religion has imagined". Pethiyagoda also named the freshwater cyprinid genus Haludaria after the Begali youth known only as Haludar, who illustrated the fishes depicted in Francis Hamilton's (1822) "Fishes of the Ganges", the founder work of Indian ichthyology.

Rohan David Pethiyagoda (abbreviated to Rohan Pett by deed poll in 2010), is one of Sri Lanka's leading naturalists and a taxonomist on Freshwater fish of Sri Lanka.

In 1998, concerned by the rapid loss of montane forest in Sri Lanka, Pethiyagoda began a (still on-going) project to convert abandoned tea plantations into natural forest, for which he was honoured by the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

Pethiyagoda diverted the profits from this book to an endowment for the Wildlife Heritage Trust (WHT), a foundation he established in 1990 to further biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka, with the business-model of publishing natural-history books and channeling the proceeds into further exploration and research. Between 1991 and 2012 WHT published some 40 books in both English and Sinhala, including widely circulated titles such as A field guide to the birds of Sri Lanka, one of several titles translated into Sinhala and, aided by a grant from the Biodiversity Window of the World Bank / Netherlands Partnership Programme, provided free to 5,000 school libraries. This program served, for the first time in Sri Lanka, to put scientific local-language biodiversity texts in the hands of young people.

He resigned from government office in 1987 to commence work on a project to explore the island’s freshwater fishes, which led to his first book, Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka (1990), a richly-illustrated account of the country’s freshwater-fish fauna.

From 1981-82 Pethiyagoda served as an engineer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka, and from 1982-87 as director of that institution. In 1984 he was concurrently appointed chairman of Sri Lanka’s Water Resources Board. He served as Advisor on Environment and Natural resources to the Government of Sri Lanka from 2002–2004 and was in 2005 elected Deputy Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. In 2008 Pethiyagoda was elected to the board of trustees of the International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, having previously served a four-year term as Deputy Chair of the Assurance Group of the British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership. In 2009 he was appointed a Research Associate of the Australian Museum, Sydney, and from 2015 to 2018 he served as Chairman of the Sri Lanka Tea Board.

Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 19 November 1955. Secondary education at St Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia. B.Sc. (Eng.) Hons. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King’s College, University of London 1977; M.Phil. in Biomedical Engineering, University of Sussex 1980.