Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, PhD, 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 elephants, including two science memoirs and two thrillers, and runs the nonprofit Utopia Scientific. 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.
Contributions to Humans & Nature
- “Touching the Dead: Elephant Funerary Bathing ,” an essay in Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature (Humans & Nature Press, 2026).
