Professor Maria Ivanova and doctoral student Candace Famiglietti detail the very serious consequences of the international wildlife trade. While there has been much media attention on the health consequences of wildlife food markets, these authors provide a much broader picture in a recent article exploring wildlife for exotic pets to wildlife in high fashion. They discuss the abuse inherent in wildlife trade, and the impact on ecosystems and environment, economies and human health. Image: [Belmont Media Center](http://scienceforthepublic.org/life/a-spotlight-on-the-impact-of-the-wildlife-trade)
**Maria Ivanova** is an international relations and environmental policy scholar. She was born and raised in Bulgaria and arrived in the United States in 1992 to attend Mount Holyoke College. She began studying international environmental policy as an undergraduate and continued in this field as a graduate student at Yale University. She pursued a joint master’s degree in International Relations and Environmental Management and then her PhD at Yale. Currently, Maria is Associate Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is also a visiting scholar at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. Her work focuses on the performance of international institutions, implementation of international environmental agreements, and sustainability.
**Candace Famiglietti** uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand global environmental governance, drawing on international law, human security, and gender. She is particularly interested in international wildlife trade and the roles of various actors - the private sector, NGOs, international treaties, indigenous peoples, and end-user communities. She is also interested in how the stories told about wildlife inform consumer behavior, environmental management on the ground, and the resulting biodiversity outcomes. She is currently a PhD student in Global Governance and Human Security and a research associate at the Center for Governance and Sustainability (CGS) at UMass Boston. For more information on the work at CGS, check out www.environmentalgovernance.org.