Following a PhD in forest ecology and silviculture in 1984 at UTas, Professor Bowman took a post as a wildlife biologist with the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Commission where he undertook pioneering field research in this tropical savanna frontier. In 1994 he was awarded a Charles Bullard Fellowship at Harvard University where he wrote an influential book on the environmental controls of Australian rainforest distribution for Cambridge University Press. In 2002 he became Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Key Centre for Tropical Wildlife Management. In 2007 he took up a research chair at the University of Tasmania where he built critical mass in pyrogeographic and environmental change biology research. He is an adjunct Professor at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University, and a visiting fellow at the Fenner School of the Environment at the Australian National University.