Asha De Vos is a Sri Lankan marine biologist & a pioneer in blue whale research around the globe. Asha De Vos was also the founder of the conservation organization known as Oceanswell. She was born in year of 1979. Currently she is 43 years of age. As of 2023 she is the first & only Sri Lankan woman with a degree in Marine Biology. She is best known for her discoveries & research about blue whales. De Vos has a total of 29 scientific publications in her name. She also has 1 book currently published which is titled as “Humpback Whale (Young Zoologist). In the words of shondaland.com De Vos is “changing the landscape of marine biology”.
Her Early Life
Asha De Vos was born in 1979 in the country of Sri Lanka, it is believed that she was born in Colombo. She attended the school known as Ladies’ College located in Colombo for her primary & secondary education. When she was 6 years of age her parents would buy her second-hand National Geographic magazines. These inspired her as she would look through the pages & "imagine that that would be me one day going places where no one else would ever go & seeing things no one else would ever see", this gave her the dream of being an "adventure scientist".
Her Later Years & Her Career
De Vos moved to Scotland for her undergraduate studies in marine & environmental sciences at the University of St. Andrews. She went on to gain her Masters in integrative bio-sciences at the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. De Vos is the first & only Sri Lankan to be awarded a Ph.D. in marine mammal research. De Vos had served as a senior programme officer in the marine & coastal unit of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She founded the Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project in 2008, which forms the first long-term study on blue whales within the northern Indian Ocean. She discovered through her research that an unrecognized unique population of blue whales, previously thought to migrate every year, stayed in waters near Sri Lanka year-round. Due to De Vos's research, the International Whaling Commission has designated Sri Lankan blue whales as a species in urgent need of conservation research & has started collaborating with the Sri Lankan government on whale ship-strikes.
De Vos is an invited member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Cetacean Specialist Group. She was a post-doctoral scholar at the University Of California Santa Cruz & a guest blogger for National Geographic. She is the founder & director of the non-profit Oceanswell, Sri Lanka's first marine conservation research & education organization.
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