Laly Lichtenfeld, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, African People and Wildlife

Registration : https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/L9J9CUyzRC2_mkg-6DTuhA

Holding Ground: Conservation, Community, and the Long View

For more than two decades, Dr. Laly Lichtenfeld has partnered with communities in Tanzania to build conservation solutions that hold — through shifting politics, funding disruptions, and the daily pressures of life in landscapes where people and wildlife rely on the same land. Her work centers on a question that rarely gets asked in environmental science: not whether a solution was implemented, but whether it lasts. In this talk, she draws on field experience to explore what sustainable solutions require in practice, including local decision-making, women’s leadership, and the collaborative processes that keep conservation grounded when conditions change. The lessons reach well beyond conservation, offering a framework for anyone working on complex social and environmental challenges in an uncertain world.

Laly received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2005 in the disciplines of social ecology and wildlife ecology. She is a Fulbright Scholar, a National Geographic Explorer, an invited member of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority Research Advisory Committee, a distinguished alumna of the Yale Tropical Resources Institute, a recipient of the 2016 Lowell Thomas Award for Open Space Conservation, a 2019 Women of Discovery Awardee, and a finalist for the prestigious 2025 Indianpolis Prize. An accomplished speaker, in 2019 Laly was honored to be named a “Woman of Impact” by the National Geographic Society and featured among some of the world’s leading female visionaries in Women of Impact: Changing the World, a one-hour documentary aired on the National Geographic Channel.