Dr. Courtney Coon
USA
Lead Wildlife Biologist
I am interested in examining the role of individual, population, and environmental variation in animal health. I have a bachelors in animal biology (and minor in art history – woot!) from UC Davis and a PhD from the University of South Florida. For my graduate work, I investigated the ecological interactions between a recently invaded songbird, its native competitors, and their shared parasites in Kenya and Florida. After that, I worked for two years as a post-doc at the University of Pretoria in South Africa where I studied infection incidence and immunity in wild African buffalos inside a wildlife preserve and domestic cattle that live near the preserve boundaries. I am now a mom and working in the San Francisco Bay Area for a small wild cat conservation non-profit where I design, implement, and manage multiple projects aimed at conserving wildlife and promoting human-wildlife coexistence locally.