Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, or Kullu as he is better known, is a scientist and conservationist.
Kullu is the Director of the India Program of the Snow Leopard Trust, and he is also a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation.
Kullu is a CIFAR fellow (2023-2028). He was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Zu Berlin (2022), a recipient of the National Geographic Young Explorer (2011) and collaboration grants (2015), Conservation Leadership Award grant (2020), and the British Ecological Society’s Southwood Prize winner (2013).
Kullu always wanted a career in the outdoors but he did not think about ecology and conservation until much later in life.
His first tryst with the mountains happened as a mountaineer. But after spending time in the Himalayas for his mountaineering expeditions, he found a new love for the ecology of the place.
The master’s course in wildlife biology and conservation from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, gave him the first opportunity to spend a full winter following the bharal in the remote Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh.
There was no looking back after this, Kullu went on to study the snow leopard in the Himalayas in India and the Altai mountains of Mongolia for his PhD. Since then, he has studied them in India, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia.