Thomas (“T”) Schwertner joined WildCRU in 2026 as the Course Lead for WildCRU’s Collaborative Conservation Training Program. A wildlife biologist with more than three decades of professional experience, his work has focussed mainly on wildlife management and biodiversity conservation in arid rangelands.

T’s career has long straddled the worlds of applied conservation and academia. He spent 13 years as a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, providing technical guidance and outreach programmes to natural resource managers as well as overseeing several statewide game bird programmes. These included successful reintroduction efforts for eastern wild turkey in the Pineywoods Ecoregion of East Texas.

Since 2011, he has been a Professor of Wildlife Science at Tarleton State University in Texas, USA, where he served as Head of Department from 2014 to 2019.

T developed Tarleton’s Southern African Wildlife Field School, a two-month study abroad, based in the Kalahari of western Botswana, that introduces undergraduate students to various aspects of biodiversity research and conservation, as well as practical field skills. He also developed a similar field studies programme in Texas.

T’s current research addresses the impact of livestock grazing on biodiversity in the Kalahari of western Botswana, as well as livestock-carnivore interactions and antelope movements in the region. T’s previous positions include senior ecologist with Bio-West, Inc. in Logan, Utah, where he led biodiversity assessments in the Mojave Desert and Missouri River ecosystems, as well as research wildlife biologist with Texas A&M AgriLife Research. In addition to his role with WildCRU, T is a member of the IUCN Pigeon and Dove Working Group, and research advisor to Cheetah Conservation Botswana.