Dr Fairus Jalil
Dr Mohd. Fairus Jalil passed away on July 25, 2009 of a B-strep pneumonia. He was only 36 years old.
I met Fairus for the first time back in 2001. Professor Maryati Mohamed, the former Director of the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ITBC) at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, selected him to be my counterpart for our Darwin Initiative project on the conservation genetics of the Bornean orangutan in the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. Fairus was at that time a confirmed entomologist, with a passion for butterflies, but he was not scared to make a U-turn, accept the challenge, and train himself in the fields of primatology and conservation genetics. I remember our first expedition on the Kinabatangan river, eight years ago, looking for orangutans along the river, on very hot days, and collecting hair and faecal samples.
I remember camping on the river bank, eating prawns, and talking about his future as a primate geneticist, about establishing a primate centre at ITBC, while watching the sun set and listening to the proboscis monkeys. Then, in June 2001, Fairus and I travelled to Cardiff University in the UK and spent six months together, extracting DNA from more than 300 orangutan samples. We spent hours sitting side by side, at the extraction hood, “playing” with faeces. We were living in the same house, walking back every day from the University to Riverside very late in the evening, stopping at a Chinese takeaway and watching a movie together. I remember the day we went back to Sabah together, his suitcase was full of DVDs, books, and CDs with thousands of scientific articles that he burned for the library at ITBC. I remember Fairus the collector!
Although faeces were not as attractive and colorful as butterflies, Fairus decided that he wanted to enrol for a PhD and we designed together a project on the comparative phylogeography and population genetics of the Kinabatangan orangutan, proboscis monkey and long-tailed macaques, using faecal material. He started his PhD in the summer of 2003, spent six months in the Kinabatangan with Jamil Sinyor, a field assistant from the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in Sukau, and collected over 300 dung samples of proboscis monkey and long-tailed macaques. He then spent three years at Cardiff University, analyzing the samples and producing an excellent PhD that he defended in April 2007. I remember him saying that they were his best years ever, that he was feeling happy. Everybody at G10 loved him!
His PhD in his pocket, Fairus returned to Sabah and set up the Centre for Primate Studies Borneo at ITBC, where he established successful collaborations. I remember how proud he was when his first paper from his PhD came out in the well-known journal Molecular Ecology. He was working hard on two more papers that he was going to submit over the summer. In April 2009, we started our first collaboration since his PhD, a project on nocturnal primates at Danau Girang Field Centre, focusing on the training of Ridzwan Ali, one of his CPS students. Ridzwan will soon start his PhD at Danau Girang, thanks to Fairus who transmitted his passion and who believed in him. One month before Fairus passed away, we had a long discussion about setting up a primatology field course at Danau Girang Field Centre for UMS students. We were both really looking forward to that.
Fairus was more than a colleague, he was my Friend, he was my Brother. I will miss him!
Fairus, you will always be remembered, you will always be in our hearts!
Rest in Peace, my Friend.
Benoît Goossens