Hannah Mumby

Dr Hannah Mumby is a behavioural and evolutionary ecologist. She is currently Branco Weiss – Society in Science Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Drapers’ Company Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and College for Life Sciences Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin. She leads a research group named the Bull Elephant Network Project and conducts fieldwork with Elephants Alive in the Greater Kruger Biosphere in South Africa and Mozambique.

Although she loves talking and writing about elephants, the best way to learn is to watch them. With the team, she collects behavioural observations, tracks elephant movements, collects dung to extract genetic and hormonal data and take lots of photos to assess body condition, individual identity and reproductive status. She is also actively involved with conservation efforts at the NGO Elephants Alive! and assists with collaring operations, translocating elephants and outreach work with the local community. Hannah recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship at Colorado State University.

Hannah studied first Biological Anthropology and then Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. She did her PhD with the Myanmar Timber Elephant Project at the University of Sheffield, researching the relationships between elephant mortality, fertility and stress with ecological variables. She has talked about elephants on TV and radio, in schools and universities to a wide range of audiences in India, Myanmar, Thailand, Japan, the UK, Germany, the US and beyond. Hannah lives between Cambridge, Berlin and South Africa.

Her book Elephants: Birth, Death and Family in the Lives of the Giants, is a lyrically written and deeply personal account of several years of field research, where Mumby reverently describes her own elephant encounters, alongside an exploration of the most up-to-date discoveries about the lives of these gentle giants. It was published by William Collins in April 2020.