Sarah E. Rinkevich received her Ph.D. in Wildlife Conservation from the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment in 2012. Her research focused on a reintroduced population of gray wolves on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona. She worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Endangered Species Conservation for 32 years and working closely with the Tribes in the Southwest. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is a Research Assistant Scientist at the University of Arizona, School of Natural Resources and the Environment. Before retiring, she worked closely with the Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as with the National Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Indigenous Knowledge, related to Presidential Memorandum on Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Federal Decision Making (November 15, 2021) and the subsequent Indigenous Knowledge Guidance Document. She led one of five Working Groups, the Indigenous Knowledge Training and Practice from 2022-2024. Additionally, she was recruited by the FWS’s Rocky Mountain Region to include Indigenous Knowledge of the gray wolf into the FWS’s Species Status Assessment and 12-month finding for the gray wolf. She conducted interviews with the Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Northern Arapaho, Eastern Shoshone and Salish-Kootenai tribes about their knowledge and cultural significance of the gray wolf.
