Who’s who - Introduce yourself!

Welcome to the Combatting Wildlife Cybercrime Community of Practice!  In a few sentences, please introduce yourself, your affiliation, and your areas of interest / focus.  What are you hoping to accomplish with the help of this community?




Hello everybody! My name is Polen Cisneros and I work for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) as a policy analyst in the US team. Prior to joining IFAW, I worked with INTERPOL and the OECD in various projects concentrated on tackling the illicit trafficking of wildlife. I am hoping that with the help of this community, we will be able to significantly reduce the wildlife trafficking online by sharing learned lessons and best practices as well as to cooperate in future projects that help combat this crime.

Thanks Polen!  Hi all, my name is Lu Gao and I am a Program Associate for TRAFFIC / World Wildlife Fund.  Prior to joining the team, I worked with the Rainforest Alliance on deforestation issues and with Wildilfe Conservation Society on assessing the impact of the illegal ivory trade on African elephant range states.  Through this Community of Practice, I'd like to get a better sense of emerging wildlief trends and behaviors of sellers / buyers in the online space, as well as better understand how this trade is moving and can be more effectively monitored in the Dark Web.  Looking forward to learning from everyone here!

Hello all! I'm the WILDLABS Intern based at World Wildlife Fund in DC, and I recently joined the TRAFFIC team here on a project assessing the US illegal wildlife market. Most of my prior experience has been in the field, studying large mammal ecology, human-wildlife conflict, and community-based conservation in Tanzania, and puma ecology at home in California. I also recently conducted an independent project using deep neural network models to automate species recognition in camera trap photos. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or issues regarding the WILDLABS platform - I'm here to help! 

Hi Everyone! I'm a Program Officer with WWF and TRAFFIC based in Washington, DC for the last 5.5 years. I focus on collaborating with the private sector, particularly the tech and transport sectors, to reduce wildlife trafficking through global supply chains. Along with Lu, I coordinate the Global Coalition to End Wildife Trafficking Online for WWF and TRAFFIC and am grateful to work with such passionate partners across the tech world. For this group, I'm excited to share learning and opportunites for collaboration to enhance automated detection technologies to identify and block/remove endangered species products sold online. I look forward to learning from all of you!!