Petter Granli is a co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of ElephantVoices, bringing decades of leadership and strategic vision to the organization. He has extensive experience in corporate management, entrepreneurship, marketing, and consulting — skills that he applies to advance ElephantVoices’ mission.
Petter has long combined conservation with innovative enterprise. He was a co-founder and Managing Director of Basecamp Explorer (1999–2002), where he developed eco-tourism initiatives and fostered collaborations with the Maasai community. He also initiated the Maasai Mara Cheetah Conservation Project and led a human–elephant conflict mitigation program in the Amboseli ecosystem (2004–2006), working closely with the Kenya Wildlife Service and local partners.
At ElephantVoices, Petter focuses on organizational strategy, technical infrastructure, networking, media outreach, and field operations. His leadership bridges science, communication, and on-the-ground action, ensuring that ElephantVoices remains both an effective research organization and an influential voice for elephant conservation.
Joyce Poole is a biologist, ethologist, and internationally recognized authority on elephant behavior, cognition, and communication. She earned her PhD in animal behavior from the University of Cambridge in 1982, where her dissertation focused on the reproductive and social patterns of musth in male African elephants.
Since joining the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in 1975, Joyce has led pioneering research revealing that elephants communicate using very low-frequency sound, are capable of vocal learning, and possess a rich vocal and behavioral repertoire. Her work has contributed to major discoveries, including recent evidence that elephants create and use name-like calls to address one another. In 2002, she co-founded ElephantVoices with her husband, Petter Granli, and continues to serve as its Scientific Director.
Joyce has also played a central role in elephant conservation and advocacy. Her findings that ivory poaching destroys the fabric of elephant society helped shape the 1989 international ivory trade ban. As head of the Elephant Program at the Kenya Wildlife Service 1990-94, she contributed to elephant policy development and helped train a new generation of Kenyan wildlife leaders. She has also been a strong voice against keeping elephants in captivity, serving as an expert witness in welfare-related cases.
Honored with a Smith College Medal and a Jackson Hole Lifetime Achievement Award, Joyce continues to shape how we understand and protect these extraordinary animals.
Mickey Pardo joined ElephantVoices as Senior Scientist in mid November 2025. He holds a PhD in Animal Behavior from Cornell University, with expertise in animal communication, cognition, and bioacoustics — the study of animal sound.
Mickey began studying elephant vocal communication in 2012, first working with wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. He later collaborated with Joyce Poole and other researchers to compare complex combination calls across elephant species. From 2019 to 2023, he completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship with Professor George Wittemyer, studying African savannah elephants in Samburu National Reserve, Kenya.
In collaboration with Save the Elephants and ElephantVoices, Mickey led the groundbreaking study demonstrating that elephants use name-like calls to address family members — a discovery featured by thousands of media outlets worldwide. He has also helped reveal that elephants in different populations possess distinct vocal “accents.”
As of 2025, Mickey has published around a dozen peer-reviewed works, including journal articles and a book chapter on elephants. He was named to the Explorer’s Club EC50 Class of 2025 in recognition of his contributions to elephant communication research.
Selengei Poole-Granli grew up immersed in elephants and conservation. Born and raised in Kenya as the daughter of Joyce Poole and Petter Granli, she spent much of her childhood at the Elephant Research Camp in Amboseli National Park, observing elephants in their natural habitat while her parents documented their behavior and communication.
Selengei first joined ElephantVoices in October 2017, managing the organization’s social media platforms and helping raise public awareness of elephant behavior, welfare, and conservation. She later spent a year managing Sarara Camp in northern Kenya, working closely with local communities and deepening her understanding of conservation on the ground.
She has worked as a researcher for Ecoflix, a streaming platform highlighting conservation heroes, and joined the Jane Goodall Institute (UK) in 2022. In late 2023, she returned to ElephantVoices as Communications Manager.
Selengei served as Assistant Producer for Tuskers: Brotherhood of Elephants (2025), a documentary celebrating the rare and magnificent “super-tuskers” of Amboseli. Her lifelong connection to elephants continues to shape her passion and insight, also expressed in her spare time through her own social media channels.
The largest video and audio library of elephant behaviors.