Ali Swanson
Director of Technology Initiatives
Conservation International
Ali recently joined Conservation International as the Director of Technology Initiatives to build out CI’s institutional conservation technology strategy and portfolio of conservation tech initiatives. An ecologist by background, Ali has spent the last 15 years working across conservation, technology, and international environmental policy. As part of her research into patterns of carnivore coexistence in Tanzania, she launched the novel Snapshot Serengeti.org camera trap survey and citizen-science platform, which engaged hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide in interpreting millions of camera trap images. She then joined the University of Oxford-based Zooniverse citizen science group to generalize this approach for ecologists broadly, leading the expansion of Zooniverse’s ecology program and a building out a generalized tool enabling researchers to leverage citizen science for expert-quality data interpretation. Ali left the Zooniverse in 2017 to work on international environmental policy issues at the U.S. Department of State (originally as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) science and technology policy fellow), leading a variety of bilateral, regional, and multilateral efforts on combating wildlife trafficking and zoonotic disease. She is thrilled to be stepping back into the conservation and technology nexus in this new role at CI, working broadly to advance technology solutions in the biodiversity, climate and ocean conservation domains.