Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, photographer and documentarian. She is a Research Affiliate at Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology and Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Center for Conservation Biology. She had been an Instructor at both Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools and is one of the world’s leading experts on elephants.
She has published eight popular books about her study subjects, including two science memoirs and two thrillers. She won the Sibert and Horn Book Honor for her co-authored autobiographical work of nonfiction, The Elephant Scientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books For Young Readers), along with four other literary awards in 2012.
In 2014, A Baby Elephant in the Wild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books For Young Readers) was awarded Outstanding Science Trade Book and chosen as a Junior Library Guild Selection. Inspired by a true story, Caitlin’s thriller series about the ivory trade, Ivory Ghosts (Random House Alibi), was nominated for an International Thriller Writer’s Award and was made into a comic series, Ivory Ghosts, that she authored.
Her nature prescriptive, Wild Rituals (Chronicle Prism, 2021), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and explores the importance of ritual to humans and nonhuman social animals.
She co-founded the nonprofit, Utopia Scientific (www.utopiascientific.org) with her husband, and leads science trips to Africa annually.
You can find Caitlin’s books at www.caitlineoconnell.com.
Selected blurbs about Caitlin’s adult books:
The Elephant’s Secret Sense “…is a successful combination of science and soulfulness.” – Publishers Weekly, 2007
Elephant Don “takes us inside the little-known world of African male elephants, a world that is steeped in ritual, where bonds are maintained by unexpected tenderness punctuated by violence.” – Jane Goodall, 2015