Iswan Dunggio is a scientist with broad, interdisciplinary interests that center around forest management prioritization for Wallacea Region. He graduated with an MSc in forest management and conservation from Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) in 2005, under partial funding from the UK Darwin Initiative Institute. In 2012, he received a Doctorate Degree from Bogor Agricultural University, focused on forest management and communities. The study was fully funded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.
In 2009, he received Mirriam Rothschild Award for an internship at the Imperial College London UK and the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford. During the internship at both Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, he developed an interest in community initiatives to conserve both forest biodiversity and community livelihood.
Iswan completed his Ph.D. in 2012, after which he worked as a researcher at The Environmental Governance and Sustainable Livelihoods (EGSLP) Sulawesi Program funded by Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). He is increasingly involved in the relationships between forestry and rural communities, forest bioenergy policy and practices, and the mitigation of climate change. In 2014, Iswan received an opportunity to work for the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) as a consultant for the Agriculture and Forestry Sulawesi (AgFor) project. He was involved in projects such as nurturing tree seedlings ahead of their distribution to different re-afforestation sites and also building community forestry capacity.
Since 2016, Iswan has been working as a principal researcher on the Sustainable Development Project for Climate Change, an initiative from the Research and Development Agency of Gorontalo Regency (Badan Penelitian dan Pengembangan Kabupaten Gorontalo). He participated in several activities supporting various researchers. These include creating the instrument for sustainable development goals for RPJMD.
Iswan joined Universitas Negeri Gorontalo in 2019 and is currently responsible for quality assurance at the Graduate School of Demography and Environment, to ensure the graduates and staff can deliver good research and environmental practice.
From 2021 until 2023, Iswan is working on the COP Trilateral Research Initiative project titled: Scaling-up Indonesian Bioenergy Potential through Assessment of Wallacea’s Plant Species: Data-Driven Energy Harvesting and Community-Centred Approach. The project is collaborative research between Birmingham City University UK, Tokyo University, and Gorontalo State University. In this project, he participates by collecting data regarding bioenergy forest plant species through forest data plots.