Duan was born in Namibia and grew up in South Africa. He completed his PhD at the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in 2011 on the resilience of coral reef tourism to global change and crises. Subsequent to his PhD, Duan developed a tourism research program for South African National Parks to support decision-making and management of the trade-offs and synergies between conservation and tourism. Duan started as an Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) since 2012. The Early Career Research (ECR) program of CEED supported him to conduct research on nature-based tourism and sustainable use of marine resources in Chile. Moreover, the ECR program supported and enabled Duan to work closely with policy-makers and international NGOs on the response to Africa’s Illegal Wildlife Trade crisis. He is active in international policy discussions on the illegal wildlife trade through his work with the International Institute for Environment and Development and the IUCN’s Sustainable Use and Livelihood’s Specialist Group and the World Commission for Protected Areas. Duan was awarded an Australian Research Council Early Career Fellowship (DECRA) commencing this year and was recently appointed as Senior Research Fellow at the Environmental Futures Research Institute at Griffith University. Duan continues to work closely with CEED researchers and is an appointed adjunct. He assists in the supervision of numerous postgraduate students.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

1. Phelps, J; Biggs, D, Webb, E.L. (in press) Typologies of the escalating illegal wildlife trade. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
2. Biggs D., Cooney R., Roe D. et al. (in press) Developing a theory of change for a community‐based response to illegal wildlife trade. Conservation Biology
3. Biggs D., Holden M.H., Bracscowzki A.R., Possingham H.P. (2016) Elephant Poaching: Track the impact of Kenya's ivory burn (correspondence). Nature 534, 179-179                                              
4. Biggs D., Amar F., Valdebenito A., Gelcich S. (2016) Potential Synergies between Nature-Based Tourism and Sustainable Use of Marine Resources: Insights from Dive Tourism in Territorial User Rights for Fisheries in Chile. PloS one 11, e0148862     
5. Biggs D., Hicks C.C., Cinner J.E., Hall C.M. 2015. Marine tourism in the face of global change: The resilience of enterprises to crises in Thailand and Australia. Ocean & Coastal Management 105, 65-74.
6. Biggs, D.; Courchamp F.C.; Martin, R; Possingham, H.P. 2013. Legal Trade of Africa’s Rhino Horns. Science 339:1038-1039