Prior to joining WildCRU, I completed a BSc Hons in Zoology from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. After graduation, I interned in Paraguay for six months before moving to the Peruvian Amazon, where I conducted rapid assessment surveys and baseline data collection on medium and large mammal populations. I have been working in the Madre de Dios region of southeastern Peru since for the past decade.

I first joined WildCRU in 2017 as a Post-Graduate Diploma “Panther” student. After the Diploma ended, I was awarded a Post-Panther Scholarship, which saw me join the Trans-Kalahari Predator Programme (TKPP) as a data assistant. Under the supervision of Prof Andrew Loveridge, I processed camera trap images of spotted and brown hyaena from 2017 to 2020. I was able to join the TKPP team in Zimbabwe where I received training in the deployment of a large camera trap grid.

In 2020 I joined a collaborative project between WildCRU and WildEye, a South African tech company that uses AI for conservation. I assisted in the testing and optimisation of an artificial intelligence-driven photo tagging system for camera trap data, now called “TrapTagger”.

I returned to WildCRU as a DPhil student in 2022. The objective of my DPhil research is to understand the recovery of mammalian biodiversity in landscapes impacted by gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon, and to inform ongoing ecological restoration. Using camera traps and aquatic eDNA, I am conducting research into patterns of land use by medium- and large-bodied mammals in naturally recovering and reforested landscapes degraded by different types of gold mining, and the implications of those patterns for the key process of seed dispersal. Understanding mammal populations in and around mining areas, particularly those which provide ecosystem services such as seed dispersal, will help us to assess the potential role of these mammals in reforestation. This research will inform reforestation management and strategies for optimising reforestation which can be applied more broadly to tropical forests.

I have a keen interest in elusive and understudied carnivores, so I am also conducting a study that investigates the ecological role of giant armadillos and their burrows in resource provisioning for other mammals, in particular canids and felids. I am also carrying out the first habitat use study of the short-eared dog in the Peruvian Amazon.