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J.Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership

Established in 2006 and administered by World Wildlife Fund, the Getty Award for Conservation Leadership is made possible through the generous support of Gordon Getty. The award recognizes contributions to conservation through personal leadership in one of three annually rotating areas: political leadership, scientific leadership and community leadership. It is for his leadership in the field of conservation science that Dr. K. Ullas Karanth has been selected as the winner of the 2007 award.

Dr. Karanth is a man of many accomplishments. He is one of India's senior conservationists, a world-recognized authority on the conservation of tigers, and director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India Program. He is well-known for his wide-ranging contributions to conservation and his commitment to developing the capacity of national scientists and conservationists. WWF and many other organizations have employed his robust and reliably accurate methods for monitoring wild animal populations in the field, one of the most significant fundamentals in wildlife conservation.

It is for his work in developing and refining these methods, among his many other accomplishments, that an independent panel of jurors selected Dr. Karanth as the recipient of the 2007 J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership. The $200,000 annual award is unique in that it not only honors today's top conservationists, it also builds conservation leadership for tomorrow. Each year the award is used to establish graduate fellowships named in honor of the winner and J. Paul Getty. Dr. Karanth will use his award to establish fellowships for students pursuing master's, doctoral and post-doctoral degrees in wildlife conservation at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.