Mike Baltzer, Executive Director

Mike is a conservation biologist with over 30 years of experience in Asia, Africa and Europe. He started his career undertaking and leading biological inventory expeditions in Uganda, Vietnam and Indonesia. He since specialised in leading large, complex, multi-country focused conservation programmes. For more than 18 years, he worked for WWF as the Conservation Director for their Greater Mekong Programme, Director of the Danube-Carpathian Programme and was for nine years the Lead for their global tiger programme, Tigers Alive. Mike left WWF in 2018 to launch a new partnership he conceived and founded focused on freshwater fish, SHOAL.

Michael Edmondstone, Communications and Engagement Lead

Michael has worked across a range of communications roles, including as a journalist in Tanzania, and marketing manager in a media agency. After spending the best part of a decade in the corporate sector, he joined an environmental NGO as a communications officer, where he felt he could better make a positive difference to the challenges facing the natural world. He joined SHOAL in 2020 and enjoys the challenge of drawing attention to freshwater species that have historically been overlooked.

Georgie Bull, Programme Officer

Georgie graduated in Marine Biology & Coastal Ecology, and has worked as a seagrass project assistant, and researcher for the BBC Natural History Unit, where she worked closely with remote fishing communities in Asia. She is a freelance underwater photographer, filmmaker, and science communicator with a deep-seated obsession for all things fish. She is also a keen hobbyist and loves aquascaping.

Current vacancies:

– SHOAL / IUCN SSC ASAP Southeast Asia Programme Coordinator

– SHOAL US Programme Lead