Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell

Caitlin Elizabeth O'Connell-Rodwell (born 1965) is an American conservation biologist and author. She is an instructor at Harvard Medical School, scientific consultant, co-founder and chief executive officer of Utopia Scientific, and an expert on elephants. Her elephant research was the subject of the Elephant King, an award-winning Smithsonian Channel documentary.

Education and career

Caitlin O’Connell received her B.Sc. in biology at Fairfield University in 1987 with a minor in French and art history and in 1991 her M.Sc. at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in ecology, evolution and conservation biology, involving research on seismo-acoustic communication of planthoppers.

In the course of three-year government contract involving efforts to mitigate conflicts between farmers and African elephant, she observed that also the elephants performed seismo-acoustic communication. Based on five years of experiments with captive elephants in the United States, Zimbabwe and India, She has subsequently worked at Stanford University Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow, professor of creative science writing, and instructor at its Department of Otolaryngology.

O'Connell's work has focused on elephant communication and elephant societies. (For related approaches, see: Sensory substitution.)

Awards In October 2007 she was awarded the Distinguished Young Alumna Award of the University of California, Davis.

The book The elephant scientist, which she wrote together with Donna M. Jackson and for which she and her husband Timothy C. Rodwell provided the photographs, received the Sibert Medal in 2012.

She received the Outstanding Science Trade Book award 2012 and the Junior Library Guild Selection 2011.

Publications Caitlin O'Connell(-Rodwell) is author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and several popular science books.

Academic books: The Use of Vibrations in Communication: properties, mechanisms and function across taxa, Research Signpost, 2010.

Popular science books: Wild Rituals, Chronicle Prism, San Francisco, 2021 Elephant don: the politics of a pachyderm posse, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015 with Timothy C. Rodwell: A baby elephant in the wild, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, 2014 with Timothy C. Rodwell: An elephant's life: an intimate portrait from Africa, Lyons Press, 2012 with Donna M. Jackson and Timothy C. Rodwell: The elephant scientist, Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2011 The elephant's secret sense : the hidden life of the wild herds of Africa, Free Press, New York, 2007

She has published numerous contributions in the media, among others in Scientific American, National Geographic magazine, National Geographic Channel, Africa Geographic magazine, Discovery Channel, Discover Magazine, Science News, Fox Channel, BBC Online, The Writer and Smithsonian magazine.