Kaplan Graduate Award for Khalil Karimov

Khalil Karimov, a graduate student at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) Institute of Wildlife Biology and Game Management, was recently awarded the highly competitive and prestigious Kaplan Graduate Award.

The Kaplan Graduate Awards Program was established by Panthera to help develop the next generation of wild cat biologists. The program supports the conservation efforts of outstanding young biology graduate students working on wild felids in situ. Thanks to this fellowship, Khalil will conduct research entitled “Maintaining Intact and Interactive Carnivore Communities across the Eastern Pamirs of Tajikistan” and seek to understand the spatial and behavioral ecology of snow leopards and wolves and their shared prey (argali and ibex). Through this research, Khalil hopes to inform a better policy concerning carnivores, which does not involve lethal control of wolves.

Khalil comes from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Prior to enrolling in his studies in Vienna, he worked for GIZ on a project on the conservation and sustainable use of mountain ungulates in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

20.10.2014