Liv Baker
Fellow and Chair of the BoardBiography
Dr. Liv Baker is a conservation behaviorist and expert in wild animal wellbeing. She serves as Chair of the Board at PAN Works and Research Director for Mahouts Elephant Foundation, where her work is transforming the future of Asian elephants. A founder of the emergent field of compassionate conservation, she is an honorary adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Baker has developed two original theoretical frameworks. The Spheres of Wellbeing Framework reconceptualizes how we understand and support animals through twelve interconnected dimensions encompassing physical, psychological, social, and cultural aspects of their existence. Her theory of Epistemic Ontology challenges a foundational assumption of Western behavioral science: that animals are objects to be studied rather than knowing subjects with their own perspectives. Epistemic Ontology holds that what animals know and how they exist are inseparable—that knowledge emerges through relational engagement with place, culture, and others, and cannot be captured by behaviors measured in isolation from the animal’s own perspective. The theory calls for a fundamental shift: from studying what animals do to understanding what they know in doing it, and from managing animal lives to supporting animal flourishing.
Her research spans multiple species—including elephants, primates, arachnids, rodents, and macropods—and consistently decenters human perspectives to illuminate how animals exercise autonomy and agency in shaping their own experiences, contributing to the health of their social groups, cultures, and populations. Her work also explores the nature of wildness, rewilding, and how individual variation and personality shape the ways animals navigate and create meaning in their lives.
Dr. Baker has a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Chemistry from Mount Holyoke College, USA; an MSc in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA; and she earned her PhD in Animal Welfare Science and Applied Animal Biology from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is a past fellow with the Centre for Compassionate Conservation, University of Technology Sydney, Australia, as well as the Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics, University of Cambridge, UK.
Graduate student research in Dr. Baker’s lab spans the behavior of anthropogenically disturbed Eastern grey kangaroos, behavioral repertoires of socially-disrupted chimpanzees, rewilded Serrano horses, intraspecific population differences in domesticated cats, foraging behavior of rewilded Asian elephants, noise pollution and vocal communication among zoo African elephants, animal personality and the impacts of ecotourism, visitor effects on the emotional valence of captive red kangaroos, and the impact stories of animals used in the name of conservation research.
Please feel free to contact Liv Baker (lbaker@panworks.io)