I am Associate Professor at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford and the founding Chair of the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group. I work globally in the field of human-wildlife conflict and conservation conflict resolution. My focus is on hidden social causes of conflict, community-led solutions, stakeholder dialogue, and conflict prevention. Over the past 25 years, I have worked across wide a range of socio-political contexts including conflicts over jaguars and pumas in Brazil and Venezuela, elephants in India and Indonesia, tigers in Nepal, bears in Bolivia, and fruit bats in Mauritius.
As Chair of the IUCN SSC HWCCSG I have led the development of the global IUCN Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence and the establishment of the International Conferences on HWCC, the first of which we co-hosted with Oxford in 2023. In this role I also actively engage in international policy as part of IUCN delegations to COPs, supporting negotiations around Target 4 of the UN CBD Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its monitoring indicator. For this IUCN work I was awarded the Harry Messel Award for Conservation Leadership in 2024.
Meanwhile at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit I lead our Conflict & Coexistence research theme, supervise doctoral researchers, and teach a Master’s module on HWC in the Geography Department. I have also trained several hundred researchers, practitioners, and government staff around the world via executive education courses on human-wildlife conflict and conflict resolution.
I work extensively in the intergovernmental sector, and previously served for five years as senior advisor to the Global Wildlife Program of the World Bank. I am also a technical advisor to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Royal Commission for Al Ula, and serve on the boards of the Arabian Leopard Fund and within the UN-led Collaborative Partnership for Wildlife, among others. Before this I was Head of Conservation Science at Chester Zoo, where I secured five Darwin Initiative grants and worked on human-wildlife coexistence in South Asia and Latin America.
I grew up in Indonesia, Lebanon, Germany, France, and Canada and was initially trained in zoology (BSc, Leeds) and conservation biology (MSc, DICE) before gaining my doctorate with WildCRU in conservation social research (DPhil, Oxford). I later trained in conflict negotiation at Harvard Law School and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations, and seek to bring insights from conflict studies and diplomacy into biodiversity conservation.
