About Dr. P. Gowri Shankar
King Cobra Conservationist, TED Fellow2020, TED and TEDx Speaker
Gowri Shankar is a wildlife biologist working on king cobras for close to two decades. He has authored and co-authored several scientific papers on king cobras and on other herpetological topics. He is the founder and director of Kālinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology (KCRE), Kālinga Foundation, an environmental education centre and an NGO focusing on ecological research and conservation respectively.
He was instrumental in initiating the pioneering radio telemetry study on King Cobras and was able to discover the secret life of King Cobras. He is an authority on the ecology of king cobras and has been featured in several wildlife documentaries like the ‘King and I’, ‘Secrets of the King Cobra‘, ‘Asia’s Deadliest Snake’, and ‘Wildest India’ by BBC, National Geographic Channel, NatGeoWild, Discovery Channel ‘Mysteries of Wild India’ and ‘The Cobra King’ by channels like the BBC, Discovery, NatGeo Wild, Animal Planet, Smithsonian and the National Geographic Channel.
He obtained his PhD from Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University (MSCB University), formerly North Orissa University (NOU) and former exchange student at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is a TED Fellow 2020, a TED and TEDx speaker. He was awarded ‘Herpetologist of the Year 2015’ by the Swedish Herpetological Society and ‘Vasundhara Mitra Award 2023’ by Kirloskar Ferrous Industries Limited.
Team
Notable collaborators include renowned senior scientists and taxonomists from UK, Malaysia, Sweden and India. Gathering a nearly global dataset to address this question necessarily required international collaborations and better manpower. Notable thing is also the presence of early career researchers in the team!
Dr P Gowri Shankar and his incredible team included:
Supervisors: Dr. Kartik Shanker
Scientific Collaborators: Dr. Wolfgang Wuster, Bangor University, Prof. Indraneil Das, University of Sarawak, Malaysia, Dr. Gunanidhi Sahoo, Utkal University, India.
Project Research Team: Priyanka Swamy, Dr Ganesh S.R, Dr. Vijayakumar S.P, Rhiannon Williams, and Prashanth P.
Collaborations with State Forest Departments of Karnataka, Odisha, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andaman Islands, Goa, Mizoram, Uttarakhand.
The finding of new species in the currently listed ‘vulnerable’ species, will play a crucial role in saving lives, while also protecting this endemic species, a critical contributor of wellness of the rainforest ecosystem.
Research Institutes
- Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia.
- Maharaja Shrirama Chandra Bhanja Deo University, Baripada, Takatpur, Odisha, India.
- Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, Karnataka, India.
- Department of Ecology and Genetics, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden.
- Kālinga Foundation, Guddekere, Agumbe, Shivamogga 577 411, Karnataka, India.
- Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Bangor, School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Environment Centre Wales, Bangor LL57 2UW, Wales, UK.
- Developmental Biology & Herpetology Laboratory, Department of Zoology, Mizoram University, Aizawl 796 004, Mizoram, India.
- Department of Zoology, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar 751 004, Odisha, India.
- Department of Zoology, Assam Don Bosco University, Tapesia 782 402, Assam, India.
