Priya Davidar is an Indian scientific researcher, conservation biologist, scholar, and author. She retired as a Professor at Pondicherry University and has conducted ecological research in different regions of India. She has authored a few books, including Whispers from the Wild, co-authored with E.R.C Davidar and published by Penguin India books. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012. She is actively involved with the conservation of forests and wildlife. She has published about 100 papers in scientific journals. Early life and family Davidar grew up in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, which is known of its rich variety of fauna and flora. She witnessed the loss of wildlife and nature as she grew up, which motivated her to get into the field of conservation. She said, In a competition for space, other species are rapidly losing out to humans." Davidar's father is a conservationist E.R.C. Davidar and brother Mark Davidar is one of the founders of the Sigur Nature Trust (SNT), in Masinagudi, Tamil Nadu, India which is a 30-acre [CONVERT] wildlife reserve. She married Jean-Philippe Puyravaud who is a research scientist trained in remote sensing. They have collaborated on many research papers. Education She completed her BSc in 1973 from Madras University and then moved on to get an MSc in 1975 from the same university. In 1979 she was awarded a PhD from Bombay University and later moved on to acquire a S.M. from Harvard University in 1985. For her doctoral thesis, she worked on pollination of the hemi-parasitic mistletoes by nectar feeding birds, under the guidance of the naturalist, Salim Ali, who is known as the "bird man of India". Work As a conservation biologist, her work mostly revolved around forest ecology, pollination biology and endangered species conservation. She worked for close to three decades in Pondicherry University at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences until she retired. Currently, she is working on a research project where she is "analysing tree distributions at the bio-geographical scale, and the conservation genetics of endangered species such as the Asian elephant and Nilgiri Tahr" She is one of the few women who were field biologists in the 1970s. Though scientists who have only carried out research inside of their laboratories do not adjust well to fieldwork, Allison Snow, who was a fellow postdoc in Panama remarked, "Priya was … unfazed by all the