The St. Louis Zoo has an extensive field conservation program (The Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute). They are looking for ecologists/wildlife biologists/conservation biologists to help serve as grant reviewers- see the details below. Grad students, postdocs, or profs welcome. Besides helping a great organization make good decisions on important conservation allocations, this can be good experience for grant writing and would look good on your CV.
If interested, please reply directly to Luis Padilla padilla [at] stlzoo [dot] org with the following information. Even if you are not needed this time, they may be looking for more external reviewers for future rounds as well.
- Name
- Institution
- Department/Graduate Group
- Title/Position
- Short (1-2 sentence) description of general areas of interest/expertise
About the grants and reviews:
I am Director of Animal Health (Head vet) at the Saint Louis Zoo and have been tasked with getting some anonymous reviews for some of our internal field conservation projects. Our field conservation “unit” is the WildCare Institute.
The Saint Louis Zoo’s WildCare Institute funds projects twice a year that are within the scope of work of the zoo’s research and conservation centers. As part of the “Field Research for Conservation” (FRC) fund, studies can get up to $10,000 per project. The panel that decides on which projects to fund is a mix of our own scientists, curators and conservation staff. However, we usually seek outside reviews by people with the scientific expertise in the field of study being proposed. Those anonymous reviews are distributed to the committee and they help us gauge whether a project is based on solid science, since the panel may not have the discipline expertise to otherwise comment on it.
To that effect – I am hoping that you can help review some of the proposals from this cycle that may fall within your area of expertise. If this is something you are able and willing to do within the next few weeks, I will forward the full proposals and some pointers on what is useful to include in the reviews. We don’t expect very lengthy reviews – most of them are 1-2 paragraphs.
The person submitting the proposal will get a summary of reviewer comments, as well as feedback on why a project was / wasn’t funded. The reviewers themselves remain anonymous, except to the person soliciting reviews (in this case me).