Jennifer Luedtke Swandby

M.A. in Historical and Systematic Theology from Wheaton College, Illinois
B.S. in Environmental Studies, Wheaton College, Illinois

As Manager of Species Partnerships, Jennifer is on a mission to foster collaborations that benefit the wild. She values co-created solutions because they are effective and there is strength in numbers, and also because something new and unique can come from the combination of talents and perspectives. After all, this planet lives and breathes and evolves through communities and symbioses. What better inspiration could we turn to? 

The seeds of Jennifer's career were planted in A Rocha's community-based projects in Kenya, the United Kingdom, Canada, and on her university campus where she well and truly became a bird nerd. Naturally, this led her to interning in the Bird Lab of the US Forest Service Redwood Sciences Laboratory. These experiences grew into work focused on international cooperation. 

From 2011-2016, Jennifer was on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission (SSC) Chair's Office team under Dr. Simon Stuart. Her leadership of the IUCN SSC Amphibian Red List Authority mobilized more than 1,000 experts worldwide and resulted in the publication of the second Global Amphibian Assessment in 2023. Jennifer was elected to the Executive Committee of the IUCN US National Committee in 2019. She is a member of the Committee On Standard English and Scientific Names (Anuran subcommittee).

Jennifer lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and Miniature Schnauzer. She tends an urban native-plant garden, a very neat kitchen, and maintains a house bird list. Her childhood home is in Switzerland, where she first learned to love our beautiful, wild world.