Position Title
Director, California Carnivores
Dr. Fernando Nájera is the Director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center California Carnivores Program. Fernando is a wildlife research veterinarian with extreme interest and passion for wild carnivore medicine, ecology, and conservation. After completing his veterinary degree, he worked in private practices, zoological institutions, and wildlife rehabilitation centers in different countries. Later he enrolled in a PhD focused on the clinical evaluation of Sunda clouded leopards, mainland clouded leopards, and Sunda leopard cats in conservation programs.
After his dissertation, he was the Iberian lynx coordinator of veterinary services for two reintroduction areas in Spain where he oversaw the disease surveillance of lynxes and sympatric carnivores. In the U.S. he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Saint Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine, investigating the link between disease prevalence and spatial ecology in bobcats and sympatric canids in Missouri.
Fernando also serves on the advisory teams for ocelot reintroduction efforts in Texas, the Iberian lynx reintroduction program in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and the Bornean Clouded Leopard Program in Malaysian Borneo. His current research portfolio at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center is focused on mountain lions and connectivity between subpopulations, habitat use, infectious disease and toxin exposure, interactions with other species, and methods of reducing conflicts between mountain lions, domestic animals, and people.