Launched as a legacy of the WildCats Conservation Alliance’s 2022 Year of the Tiger campaign, this annual award supports the professional development of early and mid-career conservationists working on big cat conservation projects funded by WildCats. The award is designed to strengthen local leadership and build long-term conservation impact by investing in the people at the heart of the work. This fund reflects our ongoing commitment to supporting local capacity, knowledge exchange, and the development of the next generation of conservation leaders.
2025 Awardees
Laksmi Datu Bahaduri
Professional Development Awardee 2025/26
Laksmi Datu Bahaduri will use the grant to attend the DESMAN course at Durrell Conservation Academy in 2026, building skills in species recovery and anti-wildlife trade efforts to support Sumatran tiger conservation.
Pilia Chiging
Professional Development Awardee 2026
Pilia Chiging will use the grant to study how cultural change and hunting practices affect tiger conservation in Arunachal Pradesh, combining camera trapping with Indigenous knowledge and ethnographic research.
Karann Putrevu
Professional Development Awardee 2026
The grant will enable Karann Putrevu to study the effects of disease-induced prey depletion on tigers in Southeast Asia through the analysis of camera trap data.
2023-2024 Awardee
Anna Klevtcova
Professional Development Awardee 2023/24
Anna Klevtcova, a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Ecology at the University of Florida, was our first Professional Development Award recipient. A conservationist from Russia’s Primorski region, Anna is researching human-Amur tiger coexistence. With WildCats’ support, she has completed two field seasons, developed a valuable media-based database on tiger-related incidents, and advanced her research despite fieldwork restrictions. Her work combines GIS, social science, and ecology to better understand and reduce tiger poaching in the Russian Far East.
