David Dudgeon has spent almost 40 years at HKU researching and writing about the streams and rivers of monsoonal East Asia, and the animals that live in and around them. His work ranges over a variety of topics from the ecology of aquatic macroinvertebrates and small fishes, through manipulative field experiments that examine predation, competition and grazing in streams, to studies of food webs, and broader-scale global analyses concerning the conservation of freshwater biodiversity.  He received the Biwako Prize in Ecology in 2000.  Dudgeon has supervised 20 M.Phil. and 22 PhD students.  His books include Tropical Asian Streams (1999), The Ecology and Biodiversity of Hong Kong (2005 and 2011), and an edited collection, Tropical Stream Ecology (2008).  A new volume - Freshwater Biodiversity: Status, Threats and Conservation - will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Dudgeon has been a member of committees tasked with addressing freshwater issues under the auspices of the international biodiversity organization DIVERSITAS, the Global Water System Project (GWSP), and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON).  He has served on the editorial boards (in two cases, as Associate Editor) of international journals, including Aquatic Conservation, Aquatic Sciences, Biotropica, Gobal Ecology & Conservation and Hydrobiologia, and was Editor-in Chief of Freshwater Biology.  Dudgeon is active on committees and advisory groups concerned with nature conservation in Hong Kong. He is a Trustee and Executive Council member of the World Wildlife Fund (HK), and is chairman of the Mai Po Management Committee charged with overseeing Hong Kong’s only Ramsar site. While at HKU, Dudgeon has served, inter alia, as Department Head (repeatedly), Science Faculty Chairman, and Associate Dean. He was Director of the School of Biological Sciences from 2015 to 2018.