Come meet our next Panda intern: Zachary David-

Hey there, my name is Zachary David and I am a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a B.S. in Biology, and a minor in Chemistry and History. I was born in the UK, but have spent most of my life in Texas. My two favorite things in the world are to travel (I have been to 43 countries) and work with animals, and working with PDXWildlife will let me combine the two! My current career goal is to work towards my Ph.D. in Animal Behavior or an ecology related field. I am primarily interested in how field research studies can be used to make conservation techniques more efficient and effective.  Eventually I would love to permanently move to Africa to conduct research on big cats.

My past experiences with animals include interning at the Houston, Pittsburgh, and Columbus Zoos, as well as spending 3 months as an intern at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. While an intern at CCF, I was exposed to a wide variety of different approaches to the conservation of a threatened species, and fell in love. We would take care of rescued cheetahs, track previously released cheetahs through GPS and radio telemetry, and assist in the incredibly successful Livestock Guarding Dog program they run there.

At the University of Pittsburgh I was an undergraduate researcher for a lab that worked with animal behavior in social spiders, specifically different personality traits and how individual variation in these traits would affect the success of the whole colony. I am incredibly excited to continue with animal behavior research with Giant Pandas, as I have to assume their personalities will be much more apparent and interesting than those of spiders!

I can’t wait to arrive in Ya’an City and meet my fellow interns and the pandas we will be working with!