Simon Pooley

After graduating with a D.Phil in Environmental History (University of Oxford) I was awarded Junior Research Fellowships at St Antony's College Oxford, and Imperial College London where I was based in Prof. E.J. Milner-Gulland's Conservation Science centre. On completion of my JRF I was hired to co-direct and lecture on the Imperial College Conservation Science MSc, before taking up my current lectureship in July 2016.

In 2015/2016 I was a Visiting Research in Zoology at the University of Oxford, where I began collaborating with members of David Macdonald's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). I secured funding from The Oxford Research Centre in Humanities (TORCH) to run a workshop on human-predator encounters drawing on researchers from conservation science, geography, history and zoology backgrounds, and I invited external experts on anthropology, conflict studies and critical social science. We have developed proposals for reframing how we think about and manage human-predator relations - published in the journal Conservation Biology.

My current interests are focused on coexistence with wildlife, and I have begun working with colleagues in India on human-crocodile coexistence in Gujarat. I am working with colleagues in the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group on guidance on living safely with crocodilians worldwide.

I am a member of the IUCN Task Force on Human Wildlife Conflict, and the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group.

I work on crocodilians in particular, notably in southern Africa and India. My infographics of crocodile attack data are available on the website CrocBITE, and my booklet and posters on preventing attacks is used in southern Africa (and downloadable from Researchgate).

My other research interests include wildfire and invasive species, and my monograph Burning Table Mountain: an environmental history of the Cape Peninsula (Palgrave 2014; UCT Press 2015) has been well reviewed in humanities, social and natural sciences journals.