Our researchers

About Luke

Luke Hecht is Grants Manager & Researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. Luke’s research uses population-level data and metrics to inform efforts to understand and improve wild animal welfare at the individual level. He introduced the concept of “welfare expectancy,” which recognizes that welfare is likely to vary systematically with age within a given species, and at the same time, that because animals die at different ages, their average lifetime welfare potentially depends on the age at which they died. Luke has also written on how wild animal welfare science intersects with cause of death, population density, trophic interactions, and habitat fragmentation.

Previous experience

Before joining Wild Animal Initiative, Luke was a Research Fellow at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he researched comparative demographic history as an approach to studying the degree and duration of ecological dependence between species (or between species and aspects of their environment), with a focus on host-parasite relationships. Prior to this, Luke completed summer research internships at NASA Goddard and JPL, where he assisted with research on how to avoid contamination of other planets with microbial life from Earth. This involved genetically inventorying the microbial species found on spacecraft or their assembly cleanrooms, and experimenting with methods to detect small amounts of DNA in challenging contexts.

Education

Luke earned his PhD in Biological Sciences from Durham University. His dissertation applied molecular ecology tools — population genetics and stable isotope analysis — to investigate potential effects of diet, life history strategy, competition, and environmental change on the demographic histories of pinnipeds and penguins.