Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, July 10, 2019.

Rae Wynn-Grant is a conservation scientist, large-carnivore ecologist, nature storyteller, and advocate with expertise in using emerging technology to identify how humans are changing the way carnivores use landscapes.

She is currently studying the ecological and social drivers of human-carnivore conflict and how human development can either facilitate or disrupt connectivity of carnivore habitat. She is carrying out this work in the Great Plains of northeast Montana where she is studying potential habitat corridors that can aid in grizzly bear conservation. She has worked on similar research with black bears in the Western Great Basin and African lions in rural Kenya and Tanzania, and grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Wynn-Grant is also a 2018 fellow with National Geographic Society working on carnivore conservation in partnership with the American Prairie Reserve.

Additionally, she is the Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Officer on the Board of Governors for the Society for Conservation Biology, focusing on providing the tools and strategies needed for embracing and advancing issues related to equitable opportunity and representation in conservation biology. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Explorer's Club, and the Board of Advisors for University of Florida's Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program.

Wynn-Grant maintains a Visiting Scientist position at the American Museum of Natural History, and adjunct faculty positions at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. She received her Bachelor of Science from Emory University, her master’s from Yale University, and her doctorate from Columbia University. She completed a Conservation Science Research and Teaching Postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.