Claire is a conservation biologist with 25 years of experience conducting field research and conservation in tropical ecosystems across Southeast Asia and Africa. After two years working in Borneo, Thailand and Nigeria on primate research and monitoring projects, she started work in Tanzania in 2002, conducting biodiversity and forest resource assessments, which contributed important baseline data about little known but scientifically significant Eastern Arc forests. This information enabled increased protection status of priority sites e.g. Ulugurus. A combined passion for primate conservation and tropical forests culminated in the completion of a PhD in 2011 on the Critically Endangered kipunji monkey, endemic to southwest Tanzania (a collaboration between WCS and Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK), the only in-depth study on Africa’s first new genus of monkey for 83 years. With WCS, I continued to support kipunji research and conservation, and work with the Ruaha-Katavi Landscape Program managing ecological (habitats, species and threats) and law enforcement monitoring activities (support of SMART and aerial databasing, and a canine unit) across a large network of protected areas (115,000km2). I established the first long-term vulture monitoring study in southern Tanzania, with WCS and North Carolina Zoo, confirming the importance of this population to African vulture conservation, but also an unsustainable decline in numbers due to poisoning. Working with TAWIRI, we used the outcomes of this 10-year vulture dataset to write and launch Tanzania’s first national Vulture Action Plan in December 2023. I continue the critical task of long-term monitoring of Tanzania’s vulture population.