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.
Hello! I'm Léa and I'm a WildLearning Specialist with WildTeam UK. I help create, design and deliver training courses. I love getting to know all the participants and learning from them :)
Previously, I was working with BirdLife International on forest governance issues and in my previous life I worked in the development sector in the United States. Education-wise, I have studied economic development, international relations as well as tropical forestry in the past.
Hope to catch you in a WildHub social!
I started my conservation career as a researcher/author for the Arkive online natural world encyclopedia, before managing the Wildscreen Exchange project which gives 350+ organisations across the world access to free photographs and videos for their communications. From working on this project, I developed a keen interest in conservation communications and began researching impact and technique.
I also ran the public section of the Wildscreen Festival, Witness the Wild, which is an event programme that includes a travelling bicycle-powered wildlife film cinema, the world's largest recycled and recyclable photography exhibition, and a nature-themed street art gallery. Since then, I have been running my own conservation communications business, Song and Dance Communications, but split my time 50/50 between this and field work, which mostly centres around ecosystem restoration and short-term contracts in the ecotourism industry. I also produce a seldom updated blog, which I hope to spend more time on at some point in the not-too-distant future!