Prof Alexandra Zimmermann

Alexandra Zimmermann is the founding Chair of the Specialist Group and leads the group’s work in synthesising information about HWC, facilitating cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration, building capacity, developing guidance, and helping develop and implement policy on human-wildlife conflict. For the past 25 years she has worked on human-wildlife conflict in a vast range of social, political and economic contexts around the globe, 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. Her work focuses on the hidden social causes of conflict, community-led solutions, training, policy, stakeholder dialogue and conflict prevention. When not working with and for the HWCCSG, Alexandra leads a group of researchers at the University of Oxford, where she is an Associate Professor and supervises doctoral students and teaches graduate courses on HWC. She is also a frequent independent advisor to organisations, previously to the Global Wildlife Program of the World Bank and currently to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Royal Commission for Al Ula, as well as serving on the boards of the Arabian Leopard Fund, the Coexistence Fund by Elephant Family, and as part of the UN-led Collaborative Partnership for Wildlife, among others. Before this she was Head of Conservation Science at Chester Zoo, where she secured five Darwin Initiative grants and developed community-based human-wildlife coexistence approaches in South Asia and Latin America. Raised in Indonesia, Lebanon, Germany, France, and Canada, her initial training was in zoology and conservation sciences (BSc Leeds, MSc DICE) before she gained her doctorate in conservation social research (DPhil Oxford), trained as a facilitator and then in non-profit strategy and conflict negotiation at Harvard and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations.