How a Mindset Shift is Helping Me Balance Academia and Grassroots Conservation Work
Written by Charles Emogor
A few months into my postdoc, conducting fieldwork to monitor wildlife hunting in Nigeria, my team and I spent many hours during the day travelling along narrow tracks on motorcycles and stopping in remote forest communities to hold tense but hopeful meetings with hunting groups. At night, there was no rest for the weary as I scrambled to keep the pangolin conservation organisation I had founded as a PhD student running. I was physically and mentally drained, and I began to wonder: was my vision of combining my career as a researcher with directing a grassroots nonprofit unrealistic?
As a child growing up in a semi-urban Nigerian town, I was fascinated by the small mammals I saw around my neighbourhood, but I never knew about the shy, quirky pangolins (also found there) until I saw them on television in my teens. Because my PhD involved tracking pangolin movement using GPS telemetry, I finally encountered a white-bellied pangolin in the flesh in Nigeria’s Cross River National Park in 2020. This experience laid bare pangolin’s vulnerability. Instead of fleeing, it curled into a ball when frightened as we attempted to capture it—a defensive response that unfortunately makes them easy to poach.
Steered by the challenges of finding and tracking wild pangolins, I shifted my PhD focus to working with local stakeholders (particularly hunters) to understand the underlying motivations behind African pangolin exploitation. Around this time, however, I also began to question whether my research alone would be sufficient or timely enough to curb the accelerating rate of pangolin poaching and this question prompted me to explore more practical, immediate approaches to conservation.
With fieldwork on hold thanks to the COVID-19 lockdowns in Nigeria, I followed this thread and created social media accounts to share updates about my work and the plight of pangolins. A year later, the Pangolin Protection Network or Pangolino (Italian for pangolin), was officially registered in Nigeria. Alongside promoting pangolin conservation, Pangolino aims to create opportunities for young Nigerian conservationists to gain practical field experience, the kind that was not easy to come by when I began my career.
As Pangolino developed, research remained central to my life. I had discovered my passion for it about midway through my PhD and, motivated by the pressing need to address critical research gaps in Nigerian conservation, chose to pursue a research career.
As my PhD research and Pangolino focused on pangolins, running the organisation during my PhD (which was a relatively stable position as an early career researcher) was not challenging. In addition, I had raised $50,000 from the Wildlife Conservation Society around this time, which eased fundraising pressure. Running Pangolino was also incredibly rewarding. It helped me hone my time and project management, public engagement, and mentoring skills; crucial to my work as a researcher. By planning my day and week ahead, for example, I was more efficient with my time, so I could carve out the necessary space for Pangolino activities while continuing to make suitable progress in my research. Moreover, my mentoring experience with the Pangolino team has helped me navigate the differences in the abilities and personalities of the students I now supervise.
But as I transitioned to my postdoc on using AI to improve ranger patrols in national parks across sub-Saharan Africa, simultaneously running Pangolino began to take a toll. As I could no longer escape this internal tussle, I decided to speak with a coach to figure out my ‘double life’. For me, this was not a simple decision because I grew up in a culture that applauded solving one’s own problems. In fact, I needed a lot of mental preparation before the session itself. Going in, I was hopeful but tense and apprehensive.
“Rather than treating Pangolino and your academic career as two separate and competing commitments, view them as an interconnected ecosystem for research, conservation, and mentorship”. This is how Francesca Hodgson concluded our session. And there it was, Ecosystem! A word that immediately resonated with me. Suddenly, it all made sense. My research and Pangolino are two sides of the same coin. No wonder it has been difficult to choose one and forego the other.
It has been almost a year since that mentoring session, and since then, I have viewed Pangolino as a platform, not simply a project or an organisation. Pangolino continues to promote pangolin protection, while creating a space that enables others (especially early-career Nigerian conservationists) to gain experience and lead initiatives, which in turn allows me to embrace a more distributed model of leadership. I have now encouraged the core team members to begin scoping grants and leading on publications based on our research and conservation work, while I provide guidance via regular check-ins. Letting go of control was more challenging than I anticipated. I had to confront my own assumptions about leadership and value; that stepping back does not mean I am less committed, but instead shows commitment to making space for others to grow.
Ultimately, this dual role is making me a better scientist. Running Pangolino has exposed me to skills that are rarely taught in graduate school but vital for any research leader. It’s also deepened my appreciation for the gap between academic knowledge and on-the-ground action, and for the power of collaboration to bridge that divide. My long-term goal is to lead my own lab and mentor students from the Global South, where research capacity is budding, while building another Nigerian's capacity to run Pangolino in the long term. I’ve shifted from trying to pick one of two narrow paths to focusing on creating a wider road that spans both, and working with others to navigate it together.
Charles Emogor is a 2024 Schmidt Science Fellow affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He studies patterns of wildlife poaching in African national parks, leveraging machine learning and spatial poaching data from rangers and hunters to improve patrol effectiveness.
Before earning his PhD in Zoology from the University of Cambridge in 2024, where he studied threats to pangolins – a highly trafficked group of animals, Charles completed an MSc in Conservation, Biodiversity, and Management at the University of Oxford and a BSc in Forestry and Wildlife Management at Cross River University, Nigeria. He is passionate about increasing representation in academic science.