MEET OUR TEAM
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What is the coolest thing about your job?
Solving today’s conservation problems requires new approaches that integrate methods from wildlife ecology, wildlife health, genomics, and social sciences with emerging technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence. Working with a multidisciplinary team of top scientists to find novel ways to save some of the most endangered animals and their habitats around the world is by far the coolest thing about my job.
Ever since I was a kid, I have loved nature documentaries, especially the ones showing wildlife scientists conducting field research in remote parts of the world. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom gave me a first glimpse into the world of wildlife conservation and research, and inspired me to become a wildlife biologist myself. Natural historian David Attenborough’s incredible documentaries on the life on Earth are still among my favorites, and I love watching them with my kids.
Mathias Tobler, Ph.D. Leads the Population Sustainability team, a multidisciplinary group of researchers using science, technology, and boots-on-the-ground fieldwork to save wildlife around the globe.
Why did you become a scientist? What drew you to this field?
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MICHEL VIARD/GETTY IMAGES PLUS
When I was finishing high school, I had two main interests: being outdoors hiking, climbing, camping and watching wildlife; and programming my computer. Studying environmental sciences and wildlife ecology was the ideal way of combining the two. I was able to spend a lot of time in remote parts of Tanzania and the Peruvian Amazon studying large mammals, and then come back and write computer models to analyze the data—all while helping to protect wildlife and wilderness areas.
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I believe that, as an international conservation organization, one of our most important roles is to enhance local capacity and to train the next generation of conservation leaders that can carry on the work we start.
6 / SAN DIEGO ZOO WILDLIFE ALLIANCE JOURNAL / JULY/AUGUST 2021
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What book or film influenced you or made a strong impression?
What has surprised you about working in wildlife science?
When most of us think about wildlife biology, we think about researchers driving an old Land Rover through the bush tracking an elephant, or spending months in a remote field station in the Amazon observing monkeys. While this is, of course, still a very important part of our work, with the advances of technology, we also need to be engineers, computer programmers, lab technicians, and drone pilots.
