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Margaret Kosmala is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota who is co-advised by professors Craig Packer and David Tilman. Her work broadly addresses community ecology and dynamics of disease within systems. She is currently studying the dynamics of bovine tuberculosis in lions and Cape buffalo in Kruger National Park, South Africa.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Megan Straus received a B.S. in anthropology-zoology and psychology from the University of Michigan, where she conducted her honors thesis on male-female interactions in captive chimpanzees. After completing her undergraduate degree, Megan worked on a prairie dog conservation effort in southwest Utah and as a research assistant at the University of Washington. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. Her research focuses on the ecology, behavior and conservation of giraffes (twiga) in Serengeti National Park. An adjunct member of the Serengeti Lion Project, she is particularly interested in lion-giraffe interactions. For more information about Megan’s research please visit the Serengeti Giraffe Project.
Ali, who started her Ph.D. research at the University of Minnesota in 2008, studies the complex interactions of natural systems. She became interested in community ecology and animal behavior during her undergraduate education at the University of Virginia, where she earned a biology degree in 2005. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on how certain behaviors may make species more vulnerable to extinction in the face of increasing anthropogenic change. After graduation, she spent two years conducting ecological research across the U.S. and Mexico and one year working on state environmental policy. Her current research explores the mechanisms of predator coexistence, combining field data with analytic models, and applying coexistence theory developed for plant communities to large carnivores. She is studying how lions, hyenas and leopards coexist despite overlapping ecological requirements and the role of landscape complexity in facilitating avoidance between competing species.
George graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam in 2009 and joined the Serengeti Lion Project the following November. He is currently based in Seronera and shares responsibilities for monitoring the Serengeti study population.
Ingela received her master’s degree from Umeå University in 2005 and joined the Serengeti Lion Project in 2006—after bicycling through East Africa. Her master’s research was on bears; she returned to Sweden for 12 months in 2008 to resume her bear work before coming back to Tanzania to supervise the monitoring of Serengeti and Ngorongoro study populations. Ingela will be leaving Seronera in May 2010, but we look forward to working with her in other capacities in the future.
Harunnah is a field researcher affiliated with the University of Minnesota conducting research on human-lion conflict in southeastern Tanzania. He has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife science and conservation from the University of Dar es Salaam, an advanced diploma from the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka, and a postgraduate diploma from Oxford University. Previously, he worked for the German Technical Cooperation wildlife section where he helped facilitate community-based organizations and develop wildlife management areas surrounding Selous Game Reserve. He is currently working with Hadas Kushnir and is looking forward to pursuing his M.Sc./Ph.D. degree on implementing pragmatic measures to prevent human-lion conflict in Southern Tanzania.
Candida graduated from the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka in 2008 and joined the Serengeti Lion Project in 2009. After monitoring the Serengeti lions for a year, she recently assumed responsibility for monitoring the lion population on the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater.
Brink, who is Danish-Indonesian, grew up in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Sri Lanka. He has been a Ph.D. student since 2006 at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, UK. His research focuses on assessing the lion population of Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania, and analyzing the impact of trophy hunting. Brink spent three years working on the Serengeti Lion Project. He also carried out biodiversity studies in the Udzungwa and Usambara mountains of Tanzania for two years and worked on the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa for a year.
Monique is a professor in the anthropology department at the University of California, Davis. She works on collaborative projects relating to life history, conservation and global patterns of cultural variation. Her research interests involve fieldwork in Tanzania, collaborations at the Santa Fe Institute, applied aspects of natural resource management, and the relationship of history and geography to culture. After working as a field assistant for the lion project in the 1980s, Monique was a co-founder of Savannas Forever and the Whole Village Project in 2006. Among her many projects in rural Tanzania, she studies human-lion conflict near Katavi National Park, focusing on the Lion Dance of Sukuma warriors.
Meggan Craft received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2008. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach that uses methods from epidemiology, ecology, animal behavior and mathematics to investigate disease dynamics in animal populations. She combines empirical data from fieldwork with theoretical models to explore multi-host pathogen dynamics and persistence. She is broadly interested in questions such as:
To learn more about Meggan’s research, visit The Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health.
Emily returned to Tanzania in 2009 following a four-year break taken for graduate studies, to conduct post-doctoral research with Prof. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Prof. Tim Caro at the University of California, Davis. She is now using anthropological methods to determine the cultural and economic drivers of lion hunting by the Sukuma, in western Tanzania. Having found that many Sukuma men are turning to the non-retaliatory hunting of lions in order to reap the rewards paid by their relatives, she is starting to explore the potential for self-regulation and economic disincentives to halt Sukuma lion hunting. An ecologist by training, her previous research has covered topics ranging from neotropical amphibian population dynamics, to multi-taxon assessments of the biodiversity value of multiple use landscapes in and around Katavi National Park. Her Ph.D. research, conducted as part of the ZSL Indonesia program (formally the Jambi Tiger Project), focused on the impacts of oil palm plantations expansion on mammalian diversity in Sumatra, Indonesia and the cost-efficiency of integrating set-side land into a commercial plantation.
Dennis completed his master’s degree at the University of Dar es Salaam and earned a Ph.D. from the the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Originally from the Musoma district in the Mara region, he spent several years living in the United States while his father pursued a graduate degree. His master’s research centered on Maasai-lion conflict in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, focusing on the relationship between cattle-killing by lions and retaliatory and ritual lion hunting by Maasai. Dennis spearheaded the first large-scale surveys of man-eating lions in Tanzania and his doctoral research focused on the behavior and ecology of man-eaters in southern Tanzania. He is now research director at the Kingupira Research Station in the Selous Game Reserve.
Bernard completed his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in 2007, studying pride dynamics and population dynamics in the lions of Ngorongoro Crater and human-lion conflicts in Tarangire National Park. Bernard is from the Iramba district in the Singida region of Tanzania. He received his B.S. from the University of Dar es Salaam and completed his master’s thesis on the factors influencing lion population densities in the Ngorongoro Crater, also through the University of Dar es Salaam. Bernard’s doctoral research focused on Maasai-lion conflict around Tarangire National Park, and he is now a research scientist at the African Wildlife Foundation. He currently leads AWF’s lion conservation science project in the Maasai Steppe and is scaling-up effective conflict-mitigation strategies to protect as many Maasai as possible from future livestock losses.
Hadas Kushnir received her Ph.D. in the Conservation Biology Program at the University of Minnesota, where she conducted research on human-lion conflict in southeastern Tanzania. Her interest in conservation biology and human-wildlife conflict arose during her undergraduate career at Barnard College, where she spent a semester in Kenya studying wildlife management. Before coming to the University of Minnesota, Hadas worked for the City of New York Parks and Recreation Natural Resources Group, where she planned and implemented community-based restoration projects. She is now working to implement recommendations from her dissertation research to help keep rural Tanzanians safer and prevent future lion attacks.
Anna graduated from the University of Chicago after forsaking a dancing career in the San Francisco ballet. Her doctoral research at the University of Minnesota produced the first lion “real estate map” showing how certain landscape features confer intrinsic advantages on lion reproductive rates. Her studies also revealed how landscape heterogeneity has led to lion sociality through the evolutionary advantages of group territoriality. After leaving Minnesota, she became Research Director at the Gombe Stream Research Centre, studying chimpanzee territoriality. She is now a post-doc at Guelph University.
Kim graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2007, with a bachelor’s degree in ecology, evolution and behavior. She completed her undergraduate honors thesis with the Lion Research Center, studying social and ecological stimuli of pride divisions. She is pursuing her research interests in behavioral ecology in the Ph.D. program at University of California, Davis.
Peyton received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the ecology program at the University of Minnesota after completing her field research in the Serengeti. She majored in English at Yale University and worked in publishing in San Francisco before returning to Yale to study microbiology. Her thesis research on the evolutionary significance of the lion’s mane was featured in several documentaries as well as a full-length article in National Geographic. She published her results in Science magazine, Animal Behavior and, for a more general audience, American Scientist. After working in the mammal department at the Bronx Zoo, she moved to Washington D.C. and joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where she works on issues at the intersection of science, education and religion.
After completing her field research in Tanzania, Karyl Whitman received her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Minnesota in 2005. As an undergraduate, Karyl majored in anthropology at Rutgers University then lived in Kenya before moving to Minnesota. Karyl’s research on trophy hunting of African lions has been published in Nature and Conservation Biology and has led to important reforms in safari hunting practices in Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania. She has also published a guidebook to help hunters harvest lions more sustainably. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.
Director of the Lion Research Center
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Craig Packer was born in Texas and received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1972. While still at Stanford, Packer went to Tanzania to study baboons with Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Research Centre. He then went to the University of Sussex to complete his Ph.D. research on the Gombe baboons. After a study of Japanese macaques in Hakusan National Park, Packer returned to Tanzania in 1978 to head the Serengeti lion project. He subsequently held a post-doctoral position at the University of Chicago and joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1983, returning to the Serengeti for several months each year. Packer received a J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, became a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1997, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He is the author of “Into Africa,” which won the 1995 John Burroughs medal, and more than 100 scientific articles, most of which are about lions. His research has been supported primarily by grants from the National Science Foundation.
