About Abhijit Paul Zacharia
Abhijit is the Program Manager and lead for the Sustainability and Education initiatives at Wipro Foundation. With a background in History and Wildlife Management, Abhijit has spent 17 years working in areas closely linked with the natural environment, education and at the intersection of both. In earlier roles, he has been closely involved with key conservation programs in both Africa and India focusing on illegal wildlife trade, as well as spending considerable time designing and running wilderness experiential programs for school children in India. He has also played the role of an entrepreneur curating low footprint wilderness travel in Africa and South America. His work in corporate philanthropy at Wipro Foundation over the last 8 years has been to oversee Wipro’s Sustainability Education Program in Schools and Colleges, as well as support community ecology initiatives, with the larger vision of making sustainability thinking axiomatic to education and integral to the learning process.
About Anish Andheria
Dr. Anish Andheria is the President of the Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT), a not-for-profit, set up to preserve, protect and conserve forests and wildlife. Currently, WCT works in and around 160 national parks and wildlife sanctuaries spread across 23 states of India and catalyses path-breaking conservation action. He is a member of several Government Committees including the National Tiger Conservation Authority, an apex policy-making body of the Union Government; the State Boards of Wildlife of Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir; the Executive Committee of the Gujarat State Lion Conservation Society and the Executive Committee of the 'Village Social Transformation Programme' of Maharashtra.
He has been awarded the prestigious Carl Zeiss Conservation Award in 2008 and the UAA-Institute of Chemical Technology Distinguished Alumnus Award 2017.
After completing his Ph.D. from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, he went on to pursue Masters in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the NCBS, Bengaluru. He is a large carnivore biologist with immense knowledge on predator-prey relationships and has contributed to several carnivore conservation projects across India.
A wildlife photographer of repute, he has photographed some of the most remote wildlife reserves of India. His collection of over 350,000 images serves as a veritable archival record of the wildlife and wildernesses of India. His images have been widely used in national and international publications. He has co-authored two books on Indian wildlife and has contributed to several other books and publications, including scientific papers.
He is part of the Organising Committee of the India Climate Collaborative; member of the Governing Council of the Bombay Natural History Society; Trustee of the 'Conservation Wildlands Trust; member of the Impact Advisory Board of Raintree Foundation and part of the Advisory Council of the 'Balipara Foundation'.
A natural communicator, he is one of India's leading motivational speakers, and has introduced thousands of young people to the joys of nature and the rationale for nature conservation.
About Pooja Gupta
Pooja is a multimedia artist with a focus on science communication, from Hyderabad, India. With a specialist interest in ecology and wildlife conservation, she uses her skills in design thinking to develop multimedia content for science education. Her hands-on approach to communicating conservation has taken her across the world to work on a wide spectrum of projects: from assisting on media workshops in the remote Peruvian Amazon to filming in the Andaman Islands, and developing campaign media to support various conservation causes. She collaborates with a range of experts across disciplines including leading environmental organisations in the country to create media for positive impact. She is the one of the recipients of the Jackson wild summit scholarship 2019 and media lab fellowship in 2020. More recently, she completed her research scholarship with Creature Conserve.
About Pramod Krishnan
Pramod Krishnan is a forester by profession, passion and education. He belongs to Indian Forest Service and has worked extensively across the world on various aspects of natural resources governance and climate change. He has worked in Periyar and Parambikulam Tiger Reserves of Kerala and evolved the participatory forest management programme for tiger conservation. He has also worked in the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change and United Nations. He has authored several publications and books. Currently, he is working as the Chief Conservator of Forests in Kerala Forest Department.
About Shivani Jadeja
Shivani Jadeja is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Krea University. She is an ecologist with broad research interests spanning understanding the causes and consequences of variation in life history strategies and plant-animal interactions. In the past she has studied the role of a native seed disperser, blackbuck, in facilitating the dispersal of a woody invasive tree, Prosopis juliflora, in grassland habitats. Her recent work involved studying the variation in reproductive strategies of the soapweed yucca plant and its specialised seed herbivore - the yucca moth. At Krea, her current research is focused on understanding the effect of rising temperatures on butterflies’ life stages. Shivani holds an MSc in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the Wildlife Conservation Society – India Program and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and a PhD in Biological Sciences with specialization in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
