Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka and her team developed a One Health approach to gorilla conservation to prevent and control zoonotic disease transmission between people and gorillas, which is also holistically addressing threats to conservation and climate change.The non-profit organization CTPH is 22 years old and, in 2015, also started to improve the livelihoods of rural smallholder coffee farmers bordering Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, home to 43 percent of the world’s endangered mountain gorillas, through the Gorilla Conservation Coffee social enterprise.
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is Founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an award-winning NGO and non-profit that protects endangered gorillas and other wildlife through One Health approaches. After graduating with a Bachelor in Veterinary Medicine from the Royal Veterinary College, University of London in 1995, she established Uganda Wildlife Authority’s first veterinary department in 1996. In 2003, she completed a Zoological Medicine Residency and Master in Specialized Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina Zoological Park and a certificate in non-profit management at Duke University leading to the establishment of CTPH.
In 2015, she founded Gorilla Conservation Coffee to support farmers living around habitats where gorillas are found which won the People. Environment. Achievement award in 2024. She became a National Geographic Explorer in 2017 and won the Sierra Club EarthCare Award in 2018. In 2021, she won the UNEP Champion of the Earth Award in Science and Innovation and the Aldo Leopold Award from the American Society of Mammologists. In 2020 CTPH won the 2020 Saint Andrews Prize for the Environment. In 2023, her memoir “Walking With Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet” was published.
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