Dr Alexandra Zimmermann

Alexandra Zimmermann is the founding Chair of the Specialist Group. She has worked on human-wildlife conflicts around the world for 20 years involving many different communities in conflicts over elephants and lions in India, tigers in Nepal, bears in Bolivia, jaguars across Latin America, armadillos in Brazil, and fruit bats in Mauritius. She specialises in conflict analysis, negotiation, mediation, policy and training. Her work focusses on interdisciplinary approaches to addressing underlying social causes of conflict and designing community-led solutions. Alexandra is also a Senior Advisor with the Global Wildlife Programme at the World Bank, assisting with policy and capacity building for conflict mediation at national and intergovernmental levels, and a Senior Research Fellow at WildCRU, University of Oxford, working with doctoral and postdoctoral researchers on various aspects of HWC. She originally studied zoology (Leeds, 1997) and conservation biology (DICE, 2000) but then specialised in conservation social science for her doctorate at the University of Oxford, and trained in non-profit strategic management at Harvard Business School (2015), conflict negotiation at Harvard Law School (2017) and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations institute for training and research (2019).