Saving pangolins requires dedicated, collaborative, innovative, thoughtful, and experienced talent from around the world.
The individuals below are valued colleagues working above and beyond their already demanding conservation roles to advance the goals of the Pangolin Crisis Fund. Their contributions give all of us hope that pangolins will come back from the brink of extinction.
JG has always been passionate about animals. With over two decades of experience in the non-profit sector, his focus has been at the interface between wildlife conservation and development issues. He joined WCN in 2012 and provides strategic leadership to enhance WCN’s overall impacts, sustainability and growth. Originally from Paris, France, JG started his career working with inspiring ecologists studying chimps, gorillas, and mandrills and dodging the occasional elephant in Gabon. At the World Resources Institute, he managed an NGO network to monitor logging companies in Central Africa. He returned to Gabon with the Wildlife Conservation Society to help the development of national parks and ecotourism. For his Ph.D., JG studied the effects of tourism on people’s wellbeing around protected areas in northeastern Namibia. JG is thrilled to combine all of his interests through his work at WCN. When not at work, he tries to keep up with his wife and two children.
Kumar Paudel is a conservation scholar-practitioner from Nepal with an MPhil in Conservation Leadership from the University of Cambridge. He is the Founder and Director of Greenhood Nepal, a science-driven conservation nonprofit working on the protection of Nepal’s threatened but neglected wildlife species. His work primarily involves interdisciplinary conservation covering law enforcement, wildlife trade, community conservation, and policy. He also utilizes creative mediums like folk songs and children’s storybooks to simplify conservation science for the public. He has successfully filed and won a landmark wildlife conservation petition in Nepal’s highest court and continues to pursue research-based court actions to inform laws and policies.
Growing up with the timid creatures on his millet farm in remote Nepal, Paudel developed an early fascination with pangolins. Seeing them brutally poached for meat and trade along the Nepal-China border compelled him to pursue a career in wildlife conservation and curbing illegal wildlife trade. He initiated the Pangolin Roundtable in 2015 to scale up pangolin conservation efforts in Nepal by gathering diverse stakeholders from the government and civil society to discuss challenges and solutions. It has since become the annual flagship program for World Pangolin Day in Nepal. In an effort to curb rampant poaching, he undertook novel research to understand motivations for poaching by interviewing wildlife prisoners across the country, which has greatly informed his impactful conservation awareness and community engagement programs. He is currently leading several research and conservation projects on pangolin conservation in Nepal and South Asia.
He was a Biodiversity Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Affiliate at Lancaster University. Currently, he is Co-Chair for South Asia for the IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group and a National Geographic Explorer investigating strategies to safeguard pangolin habitats. He was also recognized as a Pangolin Champion in 2021, awarded by Save Pangolins.
Ivan Samuels is the Executive Director of March Conservation Fund, which supports biodiversity conservation projects around the world. A conservation biologist by training, he holds degrees in Environmental Studies and Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a MA in Zoology from the University of Florida. While his primary expertise is in ornithology, he draws on knowledge in tropical ecology, forestry, wildlife trafficking, and community conservation to identify impactful grantees. When not working, he is an avid cyclist, hiker, and bird watcher based in San Francisco, California.
Paul specializes in highly threatened and endangered species, incubating conservation startups, and building leadership capacity in the environmental field. Paul oversees WCN’s Crisis and Recovery Funds Strategy, including the Lion Recovery Fund. Prior to WCN, Paul was a director of Ewaso Lions and helped build and run the project. In addition to his work with WCN, he runs Save Pangolins, a project he co-founded to address the illegal trade of the little-known pangolin, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal.Paul is an alum of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders program and now serves on the board. Paul holds a BSc from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources & Environment and received his Master’s from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He was raised in the Bay Area.
