Dr Nurzhafarina Othman

Farina is an elephant ecologist based in Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo, and she has been working on the Bornean elephant conservation issues for more than 15 years. Since 2018, she and her team have started focusing their efforts on minimizing the impact of human-elephant conflict on people and elephants by providing education and awareness to the local communities on the east coast of Sabah and going beyond that to shifting attitudes and actions, especially with the stakeholders in the oil palm industry. Farina’s effort to create coexistence includes improving elephant movement capacity in the oil palm landscapes, developing a financial tool to increase local community tolerance towards the elephants, and developing interactive materials to explain elephant behavior to the public better. She received her Ph.D. from Cardiff University, UK, and received the Disney Conservation Hero award in 2015.