Aldemaro Romero Jr. height - How tall is Aldemaro Romero Jr.?

Romero served as a program director for The Nature Conservancy, in Washington, DC, then as founder and executive director of BIOMA, The Venezuelan Foundation for the Conservation of Biological Diversity. He has also served as the director of the environmental studies program at Macalester College, chair of the biological sciences department at Arkansas State University, and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He became dean of the George and Mildred School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College/City University of New York, effective July 2016. His approach to higher education emphasizes experiential learning. He has also been an advocate for the value of a liberal arts education and has produced instructional videos and spoken in public and professional forums. He has led a number of initiatives to develop academic and cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba, exemplified by the agreement between Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and the University of Havana and other Cuban cultural institutions.

Romero has held a long career as an educator and academic administrator. He served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville until 2015 and became dean of the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College/City University of New York, in July 2016.

In addition to his studies on marine mammal exploitation in the Caribbean, Romero also carried out a number of field and archival studies about the exploitation of other marine animals in the same region. One of those allowed him to discover that the first animal population depleted by Europeans in the American continent was of a pearl oyster species (Pinctada imbricata) off the coast of Venezuela. In 1996 he studied historical records and used information about the biology of these and other species to explain its rapid disappearance. Romero also conducted studies on the pollution caused by lead in gasoline in Venezuela – the only country in the Western Hemisphere that still produced leaded gasoline at that time. Those studies showed high levels of that contaminant in the Venezuelan environment and leaded gasoline was later eliminated from the market. He also produced a study about all of the environmental-related programs in U.S. higher education institutions. He concluded that the number of those programs always spiked after the electoral wins by Democratic presidents.

In 1994 he fled his native Venezuela to the United States, after denouncing the killing of dolphins by Venezuelan fishermen and receiving death threats. Since returning to the US he has taught at the University of Miami, Miami-Dade Community College, Florida Atlantic University, Macalester College, and Arkansas State University. Romero accepted the position as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2009, a position that he held until 2014. He became dean of the George and Mildred Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College/City University of New York, effective July 2016.

He obtained a Licenciatura in biology, with a zoology concentration, from the Universitat de Barcelona, in 1977, while working as a scientist in several institutions and as science writer for several printed, radio, and TV media. He obtained his doctorate in biology from the University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Florida, with a doctoral dissertation on the evolution and behavior of cavefish.

Romero met his wife Ana during the early 1970s while both were undergraduate students at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Aldemaro Romero Jr. (Caracas born September 11, 1951) is a Venezuelan/American scientist, communicator, and advocate of liberal arts education. He has published more than 1,100 works, more than 30 books and monographs, and produced, directed, written and/or hosted more than 1500 radio shows and 400 TV shows and documentaries in areas ranging from science to history and philosophy. He is known for his approaches of combining field, laboratory and archival studies from different disciplines.