Sustainability Leadership Fellow Cohort: 2019-2020

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology

Research Summary: I study the health of wild orphan African elephants. To do this, I repeatedly collected dung samples from about 20 wild orphan elephants, and also from about 20 wild non-orphan elephants of the same age that live in the same area, for over a year. I am measuring stress hormones, worm infection, and gut bacteria of each elephant using these dung samples. If orphans have higher levels of stress hormones, more worms, and more dangerous bacterial species in their gut than non-orphans, it will show that they are in worse health than non-orphans.