Stotra Chakrabarti

Born and raised in West Bengal India, I grew up watching wild elephants, leopards, and jackals in our neighborhood. My family’s relationship with wildlife that swayed between reverence and conflict, amazed me, and made me seek out a profession which could help me understand the intricacies of this balance. I celebrate the natural world by studying animals, observing them through living and camera lenses, and teaching about them. I have conducted feeding experiments on wild felids, collected a ton of animal poop to understand diet and genetics, tailed the last lions of Asia for my PhD and Postdoctoral research (a project that I still continue working on), interviewed local communities to understand their perceptions of living with carnivores, surveyed sites for carnivore reintroduction, wrangled generational datasets on lion social behavior across multiple African sites, and teamed up with colleagues and students to study wolves, coyotes, foxes and their prey. My research objectives include strong empirical approaches to understand fundamental animal behavior, which ultimately capacitate conservation.
When I am not following animals or teaching about them, I read, listen to music and ‘try’ singing along (I suck), cook new recipes, play soccer and ping-pong, complain about the Minnesota weather, hike and travel.