Safia Janjua, a first-year Environmental Sciences PhD student, was awarded $20,000 from the Panthera Sabin Snow Leopard Grant Program for her proposal "Genetic insight of last surviving snow leopard population of Pakistan employing next generation sequencing for its improved conservation and management.” Because snow leopards are endangered, secretive, and cryptic, they are very difficult to study in the wild. Safia’s award will enable her to design and optimize genetic probes for obtaining snow leopard DNA from non-invasive sources, such as scats or hair. From DNA, she will identify individuals to map home range sizes, estimate the size of the overall population, and assess the genetic health of the population. occurrence and assess the status of snow leopard population in Pakistan. She expects that her work will greatly reduce the costs of non-invasive monitoring of snow leopard populations. Safia is advised by Tom Rooney in the Department of Biological Sciences.
