Dr Lucy King
Coexistence Director
Dr Lucy King is the Coexistence Director for Save the Elephants and for our Elephant Crisis Fund. She was brought up in Somalia, Lesotho and Kenya before gaining a First-Class degree in Zoology from Bristol University (1999) and an MSc in Biology: Integrative Bioscience, from Balliol College, Oxford University (2006). She has been researching the use of honey bees and beehive fences as natural deterrents for crop-raiding elephants since 2006, publishing her findings in numerous scientific journals. Her DPhil doctoral thesis, through Oxford’s Department of Zoology and in partnership with Save the Elephants and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, was awarded the UNEP/CMS Thesis Award 2011 from the United Nations Environment Program’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species. She also won The Future for Nature Award and The St Andrews Prize for the Environment in 2013.
Dr King built the Elephants and Bees Research Center in Tsavo in 2013, elevated in 2024 to become Save the Elephants’ Tsavo Human-Elephant Coexistence Center. She is now a Research Associate with Oxford University’s Department of Biology and a member of both the Kenya Elephant Forum and IUCN’s African Elephant Specialist Group. Her TEDWomen talk has been seen by over 2.5 million people and was listed in the top ten TED talks of 2020. Lucy’s recent work with STE includes the creation of a comprehensive Human-Elephant Coexistence Toolbox manual comprising 200 pages of methods and tools to help communities to live more successfully with elephants. The manual is free to download from our website and has been translated into numerous languages.