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Christa Kugler is from the Hudson Valley region. This means countless moves across the Hudson River from Jersey to New York and back again. She is 33 years old, and is into her second semester of graduate school at Columbia University working on a Master’s in Conservation Biology. She has a deep interest in cat conservation and managing for the large landscape species like jaguar helps conserve smaller, less resource-demanding taxa that are sympatric with them. She is, however, a broad-minded conservationist who believes in the interdisciplinary nature conservation biology is growing to accommodate. We have entered the era of global problems, and can only problem-solve accordingly. She has close to 10 years of zookeeping work under her belt at Trevor Zoo in NY when she attended boarding school, and most recently the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. She has worked various seasonal field positions since college where she earned her B.S. at Virginia Tech in Forestry and Wildlife: Wildlife Management. Field positions include reintroducing the black-footed ferret in South Dakota, and waterfowl surveys in NJ. She has traveled to Belize and South Africa to hop into jaguar and leopard projects, and her Master’s thesis will likely entail genotyping a jaguar population.