Founder member and Chief Scientific Officer
Jean trained in coral propagation and restoration with the NatureSeychelles project on Cousin Island.
He and his young family settled on tiny Chole Island in the heart of the Mafia Island Marine Park Tanzania 25 years ago, after a career as a research scientist in biotechnology in the United States and in academia in Switzerland. Now he is the CEO of the Chole Mjini Conservation and Development Co. Ltd., which has won many prestigious awards for pioneering responsible and regenerative tourism and corporate social responsibility.
Jean is South-African, educated at University of Cape Town Medical School, the University of the Witwatersrand, the Technical University Berlin and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University Zurich.
Together with his wife Anne, their company and charitable trust, founded on the principle that tourism should bring real benefits to the local community and support wildlife and cultural heritage conservation, they have won many prestigious awards for pioneering responsible and regenerative tourism and corporate social responsibility.
On Chole Island they have saved the Seychelles Flying Fox in Africa, by establishing a bat sanctuary in 1994 to protect the last surviving bats, founded the Mafia Island Whale Shark Conservation Society, which initiated research on whale sharks in the Mafia channel, grow mangroves and now propagate corals to conduct coral reef regeneration experiments, among numerous other initiatives to find ways that conserve wildlife and allow traditional communities to continue to live sustainably in conservation areas.