About Me

My name is Theo Leger, I’m a wildlife biologist with a passion for small mammal management, phylogeny, and research. I’m a dedicated Fish, Conservation, and Wildlife Biology (FWCB) undergraduate student with strong ambitions to contribute to a field that I care so deeply about. At the moment I’m focusing on developing skills to break into the field, primarily through volunteer work in community outreach and assisting in bat capture for a variety of research projects that CSU is conducting.

I’ve been passionate about wildlife throughout my entire life, and have always possessed an inherent curiosity of the world around me. From a young age I’ve enjoyed conducting research projects and synthesizing information I’ve gathered into cohesive projects. This, on top of a genuine love for science communication and community building, led me to CSU’s FWCB program. Natural resources is a deeply human field, in that you need to be able to solve complex problems involving people’s relationships to wildlife, and I absolutely loved the idea of being able to play a role in addressing those issues. I’ve found a lot of people go into wildlife related careers to get away from other people, but I feel like if you’re someone who can communicate effectively and empathetically, you can make a huge difference in people’s perceptions. Ultimately, I aim to be that person.

Beyond this, I’m especially interested in bats and mitigating zoonotic disease transmission in ecological communities, as well as outreach and education regarding misunderstood species. Bats get a bad rap in spite of the services they provide us, and I aim to help show to the public that such sensitive and important species are deserving of empathy and understanding. For my research focus, I hope to make great strides in understanding how bats are able to be such successful disease vectors, and the implications of that for surrounding wildlife and humans. I would also love to learn more about the roosting habits of various bat species and make groundbreaking discoveries of the locations of these roosts, with the goal of developing mitigation strategies for large conservation concerns such as white-nose syndrome.

What I enjoy most about my field is learning more about the natural world, and taking that knowledge to help fix pressing problems in the world, as well as translate that information for those not in the scientific community. As I mentioned above, I love complex, multifaceted problems, and I love that I get to interact with such a wide variety of people as a result of all these intersections. I’m excited to be able to contribute in my own unique way, and hopefully make an impact on helping protect the many species I care about.