Dr. Patrícia Medici 

Patrícia Medici was one of the first winners of the Future For Nature Award in 2008. She won the Award for her outstanding conservation work on tapirs in Brazil. This enabled her to take a critical step towards establishing the Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative. Since May 2013 she is part of the FFN committee. 

For the past 20 years, Patrícia has been working for Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas, a Brazilian NGO, of which she was one of the founding members. Since 1996 she has been coordinating the Atlantic Forest Tapir Program in Brazil. In 2000 she was made chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Tapir Specialist Group (TSG), a network of over 100 tapir conservationists from 27 different countries worldwide. In 2008, Patrícia launched the Brazil-wide Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative (LTCI), which aims to establish tapir conservation programmes in other Brazilian biomes where the species occurs.