I am an immigrant U.S. American and dual citizen, born in Poland. In the late 1980s, my parents came to the U.S. via Germany upon being granted political asylum after leaving the Eastern Bloc. I fledged early to travel and study, living and working in a number of countries including Tanzania, South Africa, Chile, Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea and Thailand. You could say that I didn't take my freedom for granted. I earned my first degree in Animal Behavior at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania in 2001 under the mentorship of Professor Doug Candland, and a doctorate in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2007 supervised by Professor Phyllis Lee. Both Lee and Candland have been unapologetic champions for animals, their conservation and welfare. My PhD fieldwork focused on the behavioral flexibility and demography of the endangered and endemic Zanzibar red colobus monkey where it inhabits unprotected coastal forests including mangroves. Since then, swamp forests and their use by vertebrates for refuge and respite have captivated me.
After stints habituating langurs in Thailand, collecting data on conflict resolution in spider monkeys in Costa Rica, and surveying monkeys and duiker on Bioko Island in the Gulf of Guinea with Filemon Etingue (one of the best field people I've worked with), I landed in the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania where, with Trevor Jones, I co-founded an elephant research and conservation project that has since grown to become the Southern Tanzania Elephant Program (STEP). My work in Tanzania led to a postdoc with Princeton University that allowed me to carry out dung surveys of Udzungwa's forest-dwelling savanna elephants, become more engaged in the ivory trade debate, and co-develop a beehive fence initiative to mitigate crop losses associated with elephants' use of human food crops. I also lectured on the evolution and behavior of the sexes in Spring 2011 and 2012, in the footsteps of two great women who founded the course: primatologists Jeanne Altmann and Alison Jolly with whom I had the privilege to interact.
In the Udzungwas, I mentored Ponjoli Joram, the youngest Tanzanian park ecologist in the country at the time, for his Masters thesis on elephant crop-use, and also supervised Princeton undergraduate students pursuing senior thesis projects in Tanzania on primate polyspecific interactions, malaria over-diagnosis, and emergence of dengue fever. In 2014, I moved to South Africa to pursue research on samango monkeys at two Afromontane forest sites, the Soutpansberg Mountains in Limpopo and the Amathole Mountains in the Eastern Cape. Using field experiments, my team and I measured the risk monkeys perceive from natural predators and also humans with some surprising results. I also became involved in discussions about rhino horn trade that incited me to interview a vicuna ecologist in Chile, observe a session of South Africa's Parliament, compare elephant and rhino trade policies, write a policy brief for a South African think tank, and document the acceptance by the South African government of an open letter signed by 33 conservation scientists and practitioners advocating against resumption of rhino horn trade. Unfortunately, South Africa reinstated a domestic trade in rhino horn in 2017/2018 largely due to litigation and pressure from (wealthy and white) private rhino owners.
Over the years, I have consulted for a range of NGOs including in Tanzania, UK, USA and most recently, Canada, encompassing topics such as wildlife trade, coastal forest biodiversity, mitigation of highway crossings by wildlife, and wind farms. For one of these consultancies, I worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to identify and rank 62 Priority Primate Areas in Tanzania which included two sites at which I conducted my doctoral fieldwork. For another, I used the CITES wildlife trade database to crunch data on African lions for Beyond Cecil: Africa's Lions in Crisis, a collaborative report by WildAid, Panthera, and WildCRU. I have contributed blogs to National Geographic Voices and stories for their digital news and Wildlife Watch, reporting from Tanzania, South Africa and Chile including about elephant population declines, canned lion hunting, trade in Cape fur seals and other wild species, and threat of copper mining to Peruvian terns.
After many years of itinerancy, I moved back to the U.S. in Fall 2016 to take up a science and technology policy fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was hosted by the Division of International Conservation in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In Fall 2017, I left D.C. and visited Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins where I co-instructed a graduate seminar in international conservation with Prof. Joel Berger of WCS and CSU. Since then, I have been leading the "Mountain Goat Molt Project" that took me to the Yukon in summer 2018.
I intend to stay afloat wildlife conservation efforts in Africa including in my role as a scientific advisor to STEP and affiliation with Prof. Aliza le Roux's Mammal Cognition Research Group at the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa campus. I am open to other collaborations and co-supervisions of students especially on projects that blend fieldwork, partnerships with local communities and naturalists, and practical applications of findings to stimulate progressive conservation actions and policies.