We are both graduates of McMaster University Ontario, Canada with Honours degrees in Environmental Studies/Geography. We have worked as field researchers at the Smithsonian Institution’s primate project in Polonaruwa, Sri Lanka, the Turtle Conservation Project in Tangalle, Sri Lanka, before moving to Central America. There we spent 2 years living on a small island in the Panama Canal running the base camp and conducting research and rehabilitation for the Primate Sanctuary of Panama. We also worked in Costa Rica on a sloth rehabilitation and reintroduction project on the Caribbean coast.

In 2000 we returned to Sri Lanka, found the time to get married (to each other!) before starting the Leopard Project and the Wilderness & Wildlife Conservation Trust. In 2004 Andrew undertook graduate work in zoology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada investigating the importance of wolf predation risk on the habitat selection of three ungulate species (white-tailed deer, elk and moose). This project was interrupted for a semester when we returned to Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which devastated the southern and eastern coasts of the country. We carried out post tsunami census work on the wildlife of our earlier study site at Yala, which was affected by the tsunami. While Andrew returned to Guelph after 4 months in Sri Lanka, Anjali stayed on and initiated a coastal rehabilitation and replanting project which is still ongoing. She re-joined Andrew in Canada in 2006 to conduct winter field work on the wolf project. We returned to Sri Lanka in April 2007 and are now re-launching the next phase of the leopard project.

Prior funding support: The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, Sri Lanka The Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society Jetwing Hotels Inc. Research initiative The Richard Pieris company (ARPICO) National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) post-graduate scholarship