Wildlife Technology Fund

About

The Wildlife Technology Fund designs & runs scientific programs to solve problems facing, and caused by, wildlife.

What we do

Wildlife Technology designs programs to close the gap between basic science and animal interventions. We use developing tools from the innovation landscape — ARPA-style coordinated research programs, milestone payments, focused research organizations — and apply them to the problems that are both highly neglected, and large in scale.

To do this, we focus on developing talent, scoping new program areas, and running coordinated, time-bound programs focused on vetted issues. Broadly, programs we run focus on two kinds of barriers to impact:

Translation
Taking candidate interventions from theory to reality
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Translation

Many promising programs get stuck in a "valley of death" between theory and impact. The science mostly exists, but no one has integrated the pieces to turn scientific knowledge into a deployable intervention.

Example: taking rodent fertility control from a lab-explored concept to a viable, deployable product that companies can develop.

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Bottlenecks
Finding where research has stagnated and resolving barriers
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Bottlenecks

Some interventions are blocked upstream, due to a lack of fundamental knowledge about wild animals and their ecosystems. We look for scientific chokepoints and fund the specific thing that unblocks intervention-relevant research downstream.

Example: many interventions have uncertaint effects on insect populations, which adds high uncertainty to the value of the approach. Better ways to estimate and monitor insect populations in real time could unlock many solutions to wildlife isssues that currently seem too risky to implement.

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Team

Watch this space… our team is growing!

Advisors

A program of Renaissance Philanthropy

The Wildlife Technology Fund is a program of Renaissance Philanthropy. Funds at Renaissance are focused on a specific, time-bound thesis and run by an empowere program manager. For more on the fund model, see here.

Mal Graham
Mal Graham
Director, Wildlife Technology Fund

Mal directs the Wildlife Technology Fund, where they scope and runs programs that move wildlife science toward deployable interventions. Mal works with researchers, funders and field practitioners to find high-impact solutions that help people, nature, and animals.

Before joining Renaissance Philanthropy, Mal worked at the intersection of wildlife research and program design, and has spent much of their career on the question of how measurement standards get adopted in messy field conditions.

mal.graham@renphil.org
Brad Ringeisen
Brad Ringeisen
Director, Innovative Genomics Institute

Brad is the Executive Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute. Before joining the IGI, Brad was Director of the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA, where he managed a division working at the cutting edges of biology, physical sciences and engineering. He advises the Fund on genomic tools, biosafety and how large research programs are structured and held to milestones.
Nitin Sekar
Nitin Sekar
Director for Coexistence, Conservation X Labs

Nitin works on human–wildlife coexistence at Conservation X Labs. He is also a member of the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, and previously served as the national lead for elephant conservation at WWF India.

Nitin advises the fund on program areas where people and wild animals are pushed into conflict.