What I love about this college is it’s openness to change, willingness to embrace inclusivity, and efforts to promote sustainability across the landscape.
As a child in England she dreamed of warm places with wild areas. After finishing her honours and master’s degrees in the UK, she took part in a conservation program in East Africa in 1999 and has never looked back. As an ecologist she has lived and worked all over southern Africa in some amazing conservation areas. Despite these awesome experiences she has also witnessed first-hand the many of problems facing conservation in Africa.
After finishing her PhD, she went looking for work that felt like fun, is meaningful, and which allowed her to live more or less in the bush. That’s when she found the SAWC.
“I really like puzzles and problem solving so I LOVE my job coordinating research for the College’s Applied Learning Unit. I have the opportunity to think about, and address, loads of interesting and real world problems being faced by people, plants, wildlife, livestock and landscapes in and around conservation areas across Southern Africa. I get to work with vastly different data sets and data bases, conservation managers, communities and researchers from all over the world, as we tackle some of the problems currently being faced in natural resource management. And the best bit – via our curriculums at the SAWC is that we can feed what we learn straight back to the students who are, and will be, the conservation managers of the future!”