Chairman – STE Scientific Board
Dr. Wittemyer serves as the Chairman of the Scientific Board of Save the Elephants and is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at Colorado State University. His research focuses on biodiversity conservation issues, with an emphasis on determining how landscapes, humans, and climate impact demography, distribution and movement of at risk wildlife populations. As a Fulbright Fellow in 1997, he founded the long term Samburu elephant monitoring project, on which he has been working ever since. He completed his PhD in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 on the Socio-Ecology of the Samburu elephants.
He joined the IUCN’s African Elephants Specialist Group in 2008 and currently serves as a technical advisor on elephants to the Kenya Wildlife Service. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts on elephants and is currently working directly on elephant conservation projects in Kenya, Central African Republic, and Namibia as well as collaborating on elephant conservation projects across Africa.