John Cooper joined the ADU in late 1997, following an 18-month stint as a Ministerial Advisor to Professor Kader Asmal, the South African Minister for Water Affairs and Tourism, where he was involved with the Independent World Commission on the Oceans. Prior to that, he was a long-serving academic staff member of the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, from 1973 to 1996, conducting and managing primarily ecological research on seabirds in South Africa, in the sub-Antarctic and on the Antarctic Continent.

From November 1997 to March 2001 he coordinated the Seabird Conservation Programme of BirdLife International, funded by the United Kingdom's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He is a past Secretary and Chair (and remains a member) of the Bird Biology Subcommittee of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and of the Antarctic Advisory Committee of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). He is a past Vice-Chair for Antarctica of IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas. He serves on the management committees of both the Prince Edward Islands Special Nature Reserve (South Africa) and the Gough Island Nature Reserve (United Kingdom), as well as on three IUCN and one CCAMLR (Commission for the Conservation for Antarctic Marine Living Resources) specialist or working groups. He is also a Conservation Officer of the Government of Tristan da Cunha. He is Co-Editor of the international journal, Marine Ornithology, which he founded in 1976, Regional Editor for Africa of the International Journal of Ornithology, and Chair of the African Seabird Group. He has published several hundred scientific and popular articles in journals, proceedings and books over the years, and edited two scientific proceedings.

John's interests, outside his work conserving seabird and their habitats, are competitive running and cycling.

Scientific publications: 1967-1996 & 1997-2004