My background is mainly in species conservation, education and capacity exchange. I researched mother-young interactions in gorillas and chimpanzees, in captivity and the wild. After that, I worked for three years in Indonesia, where I developed and implemented youth ambassador and community engagement programmes on local and regional scales. I co-founded WildHub, a community of nature conservation professionals, in 2020 and work as their Community Lead. I am furthermore on the Advisory Board of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent where I obtained my PhD on capacity development for conservation in 2022.
Dr. Gohar Petrossian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, and the Deputy Executive Officer of the Criminal Justice Doctoral Program at CUNY Graduate Center. Dr Petrossian is a quantitative researcher and crime scientist, and her research focuses on the empirical application of crime science theories to illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and other forms of wildlife crimes. Dr. Petrossian has published over three dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on this topic. She is the author of the book The Last Fish Swimming: The Global Crime of Illegal Fishing, published in 2019. In the past two years alone, Dr Petrossian has been invited by renowned institutions and organizations as a keynote and guest speaker to discuss her research. Dr Petrossian’s work has been featured by Global Fishing Watch (A Google, Oceana, and Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation initiative), Yale University’s Environment Review, National Geographic, PBS Nature, The Center for International Maritime Security, U.S. Naval Institute, and CUNY Newswire.