Leader Details

Dorian Anderson

Dorian started birding in his Philadelphia backyard at age seven. His interest grew to include the Delaware Valley and Jersey Shore during his preteen years, and he attended several of Victor Emanuel’s youth birding camps as a teenager. He envisioned himself as an ornithologist until his educational rise and coincident alcoholism extinguished his birding desire. With his focus split between molecular biology and drinking, his childhood passion laid comatose through his twenties, rediscovered only when he got sober at age 30.

Despite the aforementioned alcoholism and coincident drug abuse which plagued his late-teens and twenties, Anderson received his B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Stanford University, did predoctoral biomedical research at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. in Developmental Genetics and Molecular Cell Biology from New York University. Returning to Boston after getting sober, he spent three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital. Eventually exhausted by the academic rat race and searching for direction, he resigned his postdoctoral position to undertake his Biking for Birds project.

Momentum from that life-changing pivot opened many doors including public speaking, travel writing, and tour guiding. He worked in Colombia as a consultant for the National Audubon Society and is currently an international birding guide for Tropical Birding. He is an accomplished bird photographer and has just published his memoir: Birding Under the Influence: Cycling across America in Search of Birds and Recovery.