Luke Hunter is the Executive Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program, where he helps to coordinate the strategies and activities of WCS’s conservation efforts on big cats in more than 25 countries. His doctoral and post-doctoral work assessed the effectiveness of translocating wild lions and cheetahs, and developed reintroduction protocols which have contributed to the recovery of lions in over 50 newly-restored populations. He is a founding member of Panthera and its former President & Chief Conservation Officer, leading the organization’s field conservation programs, and supervising its scientific research program from 2008-2018. His chief interests are devising and scaling up solutions to retaliatory killing of large carnivores by rural communities, improving the status and management capacity of protected areas, and reducing impacts on cat populations of legal hunting. He has authored/co-authored more than 180 articles in scientific journals and popular media including for BioScience, National Geographic, New Scientist and Slate. He has written eight books including Cats of Africa: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (2006), Wild Cats of the World (2015) and Carnivores of the World (2018); and he is writing the forthcoming Princeton Encyclopedia of the Cat Family. Hunter lives just outside New York City on the urban outskirts of bobcat range in the state.