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John Oates is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York, where he was a member of the teaching faculty from 1978 to 2008. He has a PhD in zoology from the University of London based on studies of the ecology and behavior of black-and-white colobus monkeys in Uganda, and has had research affiliations with Rockefeller University (New York), Cambridge University, the University of Benin (Nigeria), Njala University College (Sierra Leone) and Oxford Brookes University (England).

Oates first visited West Africa as an undergraduate at University College London in 1964, and since 1979 he has focused research and conservation efforts on that region. He has paid special attention to rainforest primates, undertaking field studies on a variety of prosimians, monkeys, and apes. In the 1980s, he played a major role in establishing a research and conservation site at Tiwai Island, Sierra Leone, and he has assisted in the creation of several other protected areas, including the Cross River and Okomu national parks in Nigeria. From 2001 to 2004 he worked with the Nigerian Conservation Foundation and the Wildlife Conservation Society to establish a biodiversity research program in Cross River State, Nigeria.

Oates has been a member of the IUCN-SSC Primate Specialist Group (PSG) since 1978 and on behalf of the PSG he compiled the "Action Plan for African Primate Conservation: 1986-90" (published in 1986); a revised version of that plan appeared in 1996 as "African Primates: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan". Oates has also contributed to PSG conservation action plans for West African chimpanzees (2003), Cross River gorillas (2007), and Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees (2011). He is the author of "Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest: How Conservation Strategies are Failing in West Africa" (University of California Press, 1999). He now lives in Kent, England.