TWO Oxford men who have dedicated their careers to protecting the world’s endangered animals have been nominated for an inter-national conservation prize.
Prof David Macdonald and Prof Claudio Sillero, of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, WIldCRU, have been nominated for the 2012 Indianapolis Prize, a $100,000 award.
Prof Macdonald founded the unit, then the only centre of its kind in Europe, and built it from just himself, as the university’s first professor of wildlife conservation, to 60 conservation researchers today.
Prof Macdonald, 60, who is based at the Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney, in the zoology department, said: “I am not only pleased for myself but also because it shines a light on the work my team has been doing.”
His research has ranged from Thames Valley water voles to Amazonian jaguars.
He said he was pleased one of his former students, Prof Sillero, founder of the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme in the Bale Mountains, was a fellow nominee.
Prof Macdonald still oversees projects on lion conservation in Zimbabwe, Ethiopian wolves, leopards in Borneo and Scottish wildcats.
Prof Sillero, 51, a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, came to Oxford 22 years ago to work on his Ethiopian wolves doctoral thesis, but stayed to establish the conservation programme.
He said: “Although we do academic research, the main drive behind all we do is to provide practical solutions to conservation problems.”
The eventual winner will be named in mid-2012.
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