Carolyn Whitesell, PhD

Carolyn is a wildlife ecologist who specializes in mitigating human-wildlife conflict. While pursuing her passion in wildlife conservation, she lived and worked for many years in southern Africa. In Namibia at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, she helped place livestock guardian dogs with local farmers to protect their livestock from cheetahs (and in turn protect the cheetahs from humans). She also conducted research, trained scat detection dogs, and assisted with the care of orphaned cheetahs. After traveling through Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Lesotho, she began her PhD research on lions in the western Okavango Delta in Botswana. While running that project, she lived in an anti-poaching camp deep in the bush and deployed GPS collars onto lions to examine their space use of cattle areas. She also had the privilege of working closely with highly skilled San trackers. As a consultant for the conservation NGO Panthera, she conducted a wildlife survey in Luengue-Luiana National Park in southeastern Angola.

After graduating with her PhD in Ecology from UC Davis, she joined University of California’s Cooperative Extension as a Human-Wildlife Interactions Advisor. Her focus now is working to minimize conflict with species ranging from CA ground squirrels to mountain lions, including collaborating with True Wild’s mountain lion research in the North Bay.

She is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she grew up. Carolyn is an avid hiker and downhill skier, but her favorite pastime is wildlife viewing in remote places around the world. She has trekked to see gorillas in Rwanda and explored the Pantanal region of Brazil to see jaguars. She has also traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Borneo.