Bio

Prasun Ghimire is a PhD student at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia, based in the Wildlife and Conservation Economics Lab working under the supervision of Dr. Sumeet Gulati. His research sits at the intersection of conservation economics and causal inference, with three focus areas: conservation policy analysis, species conservation (particularly elephants and snakes), and the externalities that environmental problems impose on marginalized communities. He is also a Graduate Fellow with the Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence cluster at UBC’s Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions Collaboratory (IBioS), where he supports grant writing, workshop organization, and a database of human-wildlife conflict in British Columbia.

Prasun grew up in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park in Nepal, an experience that shaped his interest in human-wildlife coexistence. He holds a BSc in Forestry Science from Tribhuvan University and an MSc from UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems, where he studied human-black bear interactions in British Columbia. He previously worked as a Conservation Coordinator with BC Parks, and he founded ROAR for Conservation, an NGO in Nepal. His work spans Nepal, India, and British Columbia.