Newsroom

CORVALLIS - Saving the cheetah in the wild is the focus of a lecture by Cheetah Conservation Fund director Laurie Marker, who will speak at Oregon State University on Monday, Oct. 20.

Marker's talk, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Construction & Engineering Hall at LaSells Stewart Center. Marker, a world-renowned expert on the cheetah, has received many honors, including Time magazine's Heroes for the Planet Award, for her dedication in helping to save the last remaining 12,000 cheetahs in the wild.

Marker co-founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund in 1990 in Namibia, an African country with the world's largest population of wild cheetahs. A Cheetah Conservation Fund office has been established in Kenya, East Africa, to study and educate parks and locals in how best to preserve the cheetah population in that region. Marker began working with cheetahs 25 years ago at Wildlife Safari, in Winston, Ore., and still considers Oregon her home.

The conservation fund works with Oregon's IE3 Global Internships program to offer internship opportunities in Namibia to students from public universities in Oregon and around the Northwest. The IE3 Global Internships program (formerly Global Graduates, the Oregon International Internship Program) was created by the Oregon University System to provide university students with an improved understanding of global issues and equip them with professional experience and international competence. Since the beginning of the program in 1995, more than 700 interns have been placed in 32 countries worldwide.

"Not only was working with the animals amazing, but I was able to be part of an international team all working for the same goal of cheetah conservation." said Samantha Ratti, a recent OSU graduate who spent three months as an intern at Cheetah Conservation Fund facilities in Namibia last fall.

"Looking back on my experience, I realize that I could have never gained this type of scientific and cultural knowledge in any classroom," Ratti added. "This can only be obtained by experiencing CCF."

For more information, contact Amy Nelson Green, OSU Office of International Education, at 541-737-6464. To learn more about the Cheetah Conservation Fund, visit www.cheetah.org.