Oakland University Is Honoring Laurie Marker
This spring, Oakland University will award Laurie Marker an honorary degree in recognition of a career spanning more than four decades and a body of conservation work that has genuinely altered the trajectory of a species. She is the founding Executive Director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) and a National Geographic Explorer.
Her work embodies what Oakland University aspires to cultivate: rigorous science in direct service of the world, applied not from a distance but through sustained, personal commitment to ecosystems, communities and the species that depend on both.
The Red Dirt
When our plane landed in Windhoek after a 24-hour delay, we were exhausted. In front of us was a four-hour trip to the Cheetah Conservation Fund site near the city of Ojiwarongo. We were in a strange country, at night, on barely illuminated roads and driving on the wrong side of the road. Later, I learned about another hazard obvious to anyone, but a green newcomer to this country, you have to watch out for sharp objects: a single nail puncturing a tire can leave you stranded in the countryside, with hundreds of miles of savannah stretching in every direction, plenty of potentially dangerous wildlife and not a soul in sight.
The dirt here is different. It is orange-red, the shade of the early sunset. Namibia is best known for the ancient Namib Desert and vast expanses of sparsely populated savannah dotted with small towns and occasional farms, making it one of the world’s least populated places. Located on the west coast of southern Africa, it is cut into four quarters by two modern highways, one running east from the deserts of the Atlantic Coast, the other stretching across from South Africa to the jungles of Angola. They intersect roughly in the middle, at Windhoek, the capital of independent Namibia since 1990.
You can drive for miles searching for another human being and find instead baboons climbing telephone poles, a solitary ostrich stepping through the brush and dark silhouettes of majestic giraffes outlined against an orange sunset and a deep blue sky. This may be the very birthplace of our human species and one of the most ancient habitats of our ancestors. It is a place for other species, too. Namibia is home to black rhinos, elephants, leopards and, of course, the cheetah.
It is the cheetah that brought us here and we are heading to learn a story of one incredible woman who came here forty years ago, decided to save the cheetah and changed the world.
Five Things to Know About the Cheetahs
- They are the fastest land animal: Cheetahs can reach speeds up to 70 mph in short bursts, accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in roughly three seconds.
- They do not roar: Unlike lions and leopards, cheetahs chirp, purr and emit a distinctive high-pitched bark or yelp.
- Fewer than 6,500 adults remain in the wild: Cheetahs are experiencing a severe bottleneck, down from an estimated 100,000 a century ago, according to the IUCN Red List. The Asiatic subspecies has been reduced to fewer than 20 individuals in Iran.
- Namibia hosts the largest remaining wild population: This makes it the most critical geography in the world for the species’ long-term survival.
- Their genetic uniformity is extreme: In a 2015 whole-genome study, we confirmed that cheetahs show less genetic diversity than almost any other large mammal, comparable to a fully inbred laboratory strain.
The Fastest and Most Fragile Mammal in The World
Only a century ago, an estimated over 100,000 cheetahs could be found in the vast open landscapes between India and South Africa. But the demise of this species has been almost unimaginably rapid and today this charismatic animal is among the world’s most endangered mammals. The IUCN Red List classifies the cheetah as “vulnerable”, a status that probably understates the urgency of its conservation. Only about 6,500 adult cheetahs remain in the wild today, with the vast majority in Africa, while the entire Asiatic subspecies has been reduced to fewer than 50 individuals in Iran, where it teeters on the edge of extinction.
But the cheetah’s near demise is not only about habitat destruction and human conflict. It reaches deeper. It is one of the most famous examples of what near extinction can do to an animal’s genome.
Early genetic studies delivered a startling discovery: cheetahs are so genetically identical, so deeply inbred, that a skin graft from any one individual will be accepted by any other as if it were its own. The cheetah’s body does not recognize a stranger because, genetically speaking, there are no strangers left among them, no matter how far they have come. This finding, developed by geneticist Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien and described in his popular book “Tears of the Cheetah,” fundamentally changed how scientists understood the species’ vulnerability.
What had happened to the cheetah is called a genetic bottleneck, a rapid reduction in population size that wipes out most of the gene pool of a species. The landmark 2015 study published in Genome Biology, led by Dr. O’Brien and the founding director of the CCF Dr. Laurie Marker (I have also contributed, together with many colleagues), found evidence of at least two major bottlenecks: the first roughly 12,000 years ago, tied to the mass extinction of megafauna, roughly at the end of the last ice age; and the second one, in historic times when humans who prized cheetahs as hunting companions began capturing them on the large scale.
As Marker described this to me once, “they loved them to extinction.”
Stephen J. O’Brien is one of the most accomplished geneticists of his generation, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the author of “Tears of the Cheetah,” and serves today as the Chair of the CCF board of directors. He has been a mentor to both Marker and to me, which makes two of us, in the language of science, academically related. We both address O’Brien lovingly as Chief.
What happens after a bottleneck, when the number of animals decreases, is that every mating becomes the genetic equivalent of siblings or cousins reproducing. This is what scientists call inbreeding. The result is reduced fertility and homogenized immune recognition, thereby decreasing their defenses against infectious diseases. The animals are genetically identical to the point that any virus that kills one cheetah is far more likely to kill them all.
This is not theoretical. As O’Brien describes in “Tears of the Cheetah,” page 32, a disease outbreak attributed to a feline coronavirus (feline infectious peritonitis or FIP) occurred at a wildlife facility in Oregon. The virus decimated an entire captive cheetah population in a manner that would be inconceivable in a genetically diverse species. A similar event in Africa’s wild population would not just be a tragedy. It would mean extinction.
The Woman Who Went to Namibia
Laurie Marker is a zoologist, researcher, author and educator — and one of the world’s foremost experts on cheetah conservation. She began her career in 1974, working with captive cheetahs at Wildlife Safari, a drive-through animal park in Winston, Oregon, where she spent 16 years. She became the studbook keeper for cheetahs across the United States, tracking lineages and building an institutional knowledge of the species that very few could match.
I recently talked to O’Brien about this article and asked what made Laurie so successful at what she does. He recalled first meeting her in Oregon in the early 1980s, where she managed the cheetah population as a Curator and Veterinary Clinic Supervisor at Wildlife Safari Park in Winston, Oregon. While surgically exchanging skin grafts in their cheetahs, he accidentally overheard a young Laurie Marker talking about the history of cheetah conservation efforts. “I listened to her for 30 minutes,” O’Brien told me, “and realized that this is someone who knows about cheetahs a lot more than I do — and I am supposed to be the head of the project.”
What struck him then, he said, was not just her knowledge but the totality of her engagement. “She is different because of her holistic approach to cheetah conservation efforts. She doesn’t just do some of it, she does all of it. Not just species behavior, but everything: ecology, conservation genetics, behavior, reproduction, habitat assessment, community interaction, economics and sustainability,” O’Brien said. It is a quality that is immediately apparent to anyone who spends time with Laurie Marker; you feel that she isn’t simply building a career in conservation, so much as inhabiting a cause.
The more Laurie learned about the cheetah, the more she understood that captivity was not the answer. But the crash of the captive population in Oregon also raised a deeper scientific question: if these animals were so genetically impoverished, what did the wild population actually look like? Nobody knew. As Marker told me directly: “We didn’t know what a healthy free-ranging cheetah looked like. We had little baseline information.”
That gap was the scientific reason she went to Namibia for the first time in 1977. The country held the largest remaining wild cheetah population and it was in the middle of a crisis: farmers defending their livestock were killing the cats in large numbers. Laurie went back in 1978, then returned in 1982, 1985 and 1989, deepening her relationships with local farmers and gathering data on wild animals no researcher had previously been able to study directly.
Then came the turning point. O’Brien describes it in his characteristic style: “We knew a lot about cheetah genetics, but that did not save them,” O’Brien said. “What saved them started when Laurie walked into my office in 1990 and said, ‘They have the biggest population of cheetahs in Namibia and they are killing them. I am hoping that they can stop the slaughter.’ And then she added: ‘There is no ‘they.’ It has to be me. I will go to Namibia and try to help save them.’”
And so, she went.
With a small backpack, a little money and a few friends, she traveled to Africa and stayed for a while, starting her operation out of her friend’s garage. She began interviewing farmers about the cheetahs on their land, trying to convince them to help and finding a way to get them to cooperate. Half of them were not convinced. So, according to O’Brien (who honestly admits this last detail may be a little apocryphal, but says it fits her character perfectly), Laurie said to them: “Let me talk to your children and let them convince their parents.”
“I kind of became like a legend,” she told me when I asked how the farmers received her. “People had heard about me.”
And thus, one by one, she was able to convince all the farmers, children and citizens of Namibia that cheetahs were indeed a national treasure, their own national treasure
“Determined, decisive, restless,” O’Brien said. “Just the type of person that she had to be to do this job.”
In 1990, she made it permanent. Laurie sold her house and discretionary possessions, moved to Namibia and founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
Writing the Book on the Cheetah
“We wrote the book on anything about the cheetah,” Marker told me. It is not an overstatement.
Research from the CCF has shaped the global conservation strategy for the species. It also revealed a third bottleneck. This is the most recent and the most directly human-caused: in the 1980s, Namibian farmers killed close to 10,000 cheetahs in a single decade. The current global wild population is roughly 7,000. The magnitude of what was lost in those years is almost impossible to absorb.
The years that followed Laurie’s arrival were marked by systematic observation and discovery. She and her team started collecting health data from every cheetah they could reach, building the first-ever baseline on what a healthy free-ranging cheetah actually looked like: its blood values, reproductive biology, home ranges, movement patterns and its genetics. CCF fitted cheetahs with radio collars and tracked them twice a week from small aircraft for 15 years, before satellite technology made that kind of fieldwork obsolete.
I asked incredulously if she really flew the planes to track cheetahs around the bush. “I was in a plane twice a week for three hours,” Marker recalled with a laugh. “We did that for 15 years. This was back in the old days.”
O’Brien frames what CCF has already accomplished in terms that are worth contemplating. “Do we know about the cheetah?” he asked me rhetorically. “We know a lot. We know a lot about this charismatic species, but when we started, everyone was doing a little bit of this and that, not about genetics and no one was putting this all together. It was becoming one of the better-known examples of conservation science we had, one of the best-understood species…. And yet,” he adds, “all that knowledge we had alone could not save them. What changed the trajectory of the species was Laurie’s holistic approach in going to Namibia in 1990.”
Dogs Saving Cats
The farmers are not villains. They were people protecting their livestock.
A cheetah that took a goat or a calf from a herd represented a real economic loss for a farmer in an arid land with little margin for error, where your family’s survival may be at stake. Any conservation strategy that ignored that reality would fail.
Marker’s solution was elegant, practical and drew on her experience during her years in Oregon.
The concept is ancient, dating back centuries in Turkey, where local farmers developed a breed of large dogs that are superb livestock guardians and loyal family protectors. These Anatolian Shepherds bond with goats and sheep from birth and their mere imposing presence is typically enough to deter a cheetah, who would rather not risk injury confronting a hundred-pound pup.
This strategy is clearly thinking outside the box. It is the kind of idea, obvious in retrospect, but transformative in practice, that defines Marker’s approach to cheetah conservation.
“Dogs saving cats,” Marker calls it.
“When the livestock guarding dog program sort of got started in the 1970s, some of our first dogs actually came into Oregon, ” she recalled, ” they were in our area and I learned about them there.” When she surveyed Namibian farmers about their problems with predators, she recognized the opportunity.
In 1994, the Livestock Guarding Dog Association donated the first ten dogs to CCF. Laurie convinced Namibian farmers to adopt these dogs into their families. Those who took up the dogs would dramatically cut their livestock losses from the wild-animal attacks and have fewer reasons to trap or shoot cheetahs.
CCF has since placed hundreds of dogs with farmers across Namibia and the program has become one of the most widely replicated conservation interventions through non-lethal predator control, with several other countries, including South Africa, Botswana and Tanzania, already replicating its success.
When my children, Sophia and Jacob, come to CCF, helping with the dogs is their favorite job. They get up before sunrise and are ready to feed the puppies at 7 am, despite my insistence that they should not skip breakfast. Their other favorite job is working at the Cheetah Café, serving homemade goat milk ice cream made at the model farm.
Save the Cheetah, Change the World
The cheetah requires vast tracts of open savannah: a single male may range over 500 square miles. “If you save the cheetah, you’re going to save large systems,” Marker told me. “From the birds down to the insects and everything in between, they’re all a part of this large landscape that the cheetah needs to live in.” This makes CCF such a powerful institution. Their motto, “Save the Cheetah, Change the World”, is not marketing language. It is actually an ecological argument.
Everyone who visited CCF recognizes that it is not only about cheetahs. The campus outside is a working ecosystem: a dairy and cheese-making creamery, a model farm training local farmers in sustainable agriculture and livestock guarding, a biomass technology center that processes encroaching thornbush into eco-friendly fuel logs marketed as Bushblok, solar power infrastructure running the entire operation off-grid, eco-tourism lodges, a school camp and a café.
In addition to these, CCF works on bush encroachment. In the absence of wild elephants that once kept vegetation in check and following decades of overgrazing, the savannah is being taken over by thornbush. By clearing the bush and converting it into certified fuel logs under Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standards, CCF simultaneously restores habitat, provides income for local communities and reduces pressure to convert land to agriculture.
Climate change adds another layer. Cheetahs live in arid and semi-arid landscapes and these environments are expanding under global warming, even as they become less stable. Marker sees this as both a threat and an opportunity: the cheetah and the species that share its habitat may become critical models for understanding how life adapts, or fails to adapt to the changing world.
CCF’s mission has long outgrown Namibia and operates across Africa, including Somaliland, where the illegal wildlife pet trade is most acute, driven by demand from Gulf states for cheetah cubs as status symbols, with hundreds trafficked every year and most dying in transit. Every farmer trained, every thornbush turned into a fuel log, every child in a Somaliland classroom learning about the wildlife. In Marker’s framing, it is all an act of cheetah conservation.
CCF’s maintains chapters and partner organizations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022, Marker coordinated the historic first transfer of eight cheetahs from Namibia to India, personally accompanying the cats on the flight to ensure their safety to start Project Cheetah, India’s historic program to reintroduce the species after 70 years of extinction
The logic behind this expansion is the same as everything Marker built: cheetahs need a healthy savannah, a healthy savannah needs communities with economic reasons to protect it rather than convert it and that work has to happen everywhere the cheetah still exists.
The animal is the keystone. Everything else is the arch. The question, after forty years of this, is what still drives her.
Enough to Begin
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Marker what still motivates her after all these years. “We haven’t saved the cheetah yet,” she said simply. “There is enough to begin and there’s still work to do. We’re still busy.”
Over the past century, cheetah populations have declined by more than 90%. The pressures that drove this, habitat loss, human conflict, the illegal wildlife trade and genetic fragility, have not eased and in many respects are getting worse every year. What started with one determined woman who went to Namibia started to turn the tide. The numbers in Namibia are increasing and are no longer perceived as a threat to livestock. The hard part is the beginning, but will we be able to sustain this effort? What is needed is a new generation of conservation-minded people who can take the torch.
The last time I met Laurie Marker in person was at CCF in Namibia during the ConGen Global course in January 2025, an intensive international program in conservation genetics that is organized every year and was originally established by Stephen O’Brien in 1996. ConGen brings students and faculty from around the world to the iconic locations famous for their conservation efforts. This inspires the next generation of researchers to apply what they have learned in other countries and locations with many endangered species that need our help.
It was during an evening driving into the sunset at the Little Serengeti part of the CCF site, witnessing the thriving wildlife of the savannah on the move, protected under the umbrella of cheetah conservation, that the idea emerged: what if Oakland University students could come here too?
She was enthusiastic about the idea! As a native of Michigan, this would be a connection she would cherish.
When I pressed Laurie on what she would tell students considering this path, students who might wonder whether the sacrifice is worth it, she offered something that has stayed with me: “Money might not buy you love and can’t buy you air and it’s definitely not gonna buy you life. So, we’ve got to fix it, we will help you get involved in something that’s worth living a life for and I’d like to get everybody involved in all aspects.”
The partnership between Oakland University and the Cheetah Conservation Fund will not save the cheetah on its own. But it will train people who might. And standing in red dirt at the CCF lodge in Namibia, in the pre-dawn dark, listening to the cheetahs chirping from somewhere in the acacia trees, that really feels like a good place to begin.
Oakland University Cooperates with the CCF
Oakland University is now developing a two-week study-abroad field course in partnership with Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), open to upper-level undergraduate, graduate and post-baccalaureate students.
The program will cover conservation science, wildlife genetics and ecology, environmental genomics and the management of human-wildlife conflict in the African savannah. The course will be led by two teaching faculty, Dr. Audrey J. Majeske, a geneticist and Dr. Sandra Troxell-Smith, who specializes in animal behavior and wildlife monitoring.
Students will track cheetahs, conduct camera-trap surveys, collect environmental DNA, observe predator behavior and contribute to active CCF research projects. They will also engage with the communities that share this land and discover what conservation looks like when it actually works.
The cost will be approximately $5,000 per student, covering international travel, accommodation, meals, local transport and instruction. Private sponsorship will be essential for making the program accessible to all qualified students.
What kind of student should come? Marker’s answer was characteristic: all kinds. “Think outside of the box,” she said. “Look at different collaborations — not just the field that you’re in. You have to look at the whole system.”
Conservation, in her view, is not a biological problem. It is a human problem that requires biology, economics, policy, data science and community engagement.
According to OU Director of International Education Alex Zimmerman, “This program will give OU students the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of biological fieldwork on site in the cheetah’s habitat, working in collaboration with one of the world’s premier conservation organizations.”
