Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is one of the world’s leading big cat experts, and has been called ‘The Indiana Jones of Wildlife Conservation’ by TIME Magazine. Dr. Rabinowitz graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1981 with an M.S. in zoology and a Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology and is currently the CEO of Panthera, a nonprofit organization devoted to saving the world’s wild cat species. Prior to co-founding Panthera with the organization’s Chairman, Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, Rabinowitz served as the Executive Director of the Science and Exploration Division for the Wildlife Conservation Society for almost 30 years.
Dr. Rabinowitz has dedicated his life to surveying the world’s last wild places, with the goal of preserving wild habitats and securing homes, on a large scale, for some of the world’s most endangered mammals. His focus on cats is based on conserving top predators, which affect entire ecosystems. By saving cats, the impacts are far reaching and conserve vast landscapes upon which many species depend, including humans. One of Dr. Rabinowitz’s greatest achievements was the conceptualization and implementation of the Jaguar Corridor – a series of biological and genetic corridors for jaguars across their entire range from Mexico to Argentina. Dr. Rabinowitz also initiated Panthera’s Tiger Corridor Initiative, an effort to identify and protect the world’s last remaining large interconnected tiger landscapes, with a primary focus on the remote and rugged Indo-Himalayan region of Asia.