Rebecca Dannock
BSc (Hons), PhD - Zoology and Ecology
I was born on the Gold Coast and grew up with a love for all animals. At only 10 years old I was bitten by the travel bug, courtesy of my mother and my first overseas trip to Indonesia. I hadn’t been able to shake either my love of animals or my travel bug so on a tour in Botswana at the age of 13 I found a way to combine travel and animals and ever since have been on the track towards a burgeoning wildlife conservation research career (with a lot of travel on the way).
Biography
I moved to Brisbane in 2006 to start a Bachelor of Science degree, completing in 2008 with majors in ecology and geographical sciences. My honours degree in zoology had me studying individual variation in eastern grey kangaroos at Sundown National Park. At the end of my honours I had the fortune of spending 2 months in Africa, including a month volunteering on giraffe research project in Etosha National Park which more or less sealed my fate. I couldn’t imagine not going back there and after seeing a gap in knowledge on wildebeest behaviour and conservation I started working on an idea for a PhD project.
I worked on my PhD (with the Univeristy of Queensland) from 2012, spending the better part of three years in Etosha National Park. I researched the behaviour of wildebeest to understand their resource acquisition and safety behaviours to essentially understand how they eat without being eaten. Throughout the PhD I also assisted a number of research projects in Etosha and got to experience life as a field research scientist. Now that I have completed my PhD I am working in a project and research management role with Game Rangers International in Kafue National Park with my focus on their Kafue Conservation Project.