About Niloufar Bayani

Niloufar Bayani is an environmentalist and conservationist who has dedicated her life to our Earth and all of its inhabitants. Her love and passion for Earth’s plants, animals, and diverse environments led her to pursue her Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biology at McGill University, and her Master’s Degree in Conservation Biology from Columbia University, where she became a teacher’s assistant after she graduated.

She then worked for the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) as a project advisor for their Post Conflict and Disaster Management branch from 2012-2017, after which she returned to Iran, where she was born and raised, to work as a program manager for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF). PWHF, located in Tehran, Iran, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to protecting threatened and endangered species in Iran; when Bayani worked with them they focused primarily on the endangered Asiatic Cheetah.

Bayani’s friends, family, and previous colleagues and peers, such as fellow Columbia student Daniel Hoops, have described her as honest, charismatic, and smart, with an admirable work ethic and a “joyful charm and grace.” Friend Haley LaPalme has said she is “incredibly resilient” and someone “who has this lightness, goodness, intelligence and generosity about her that is really contagious” –“she really brings out the best in people,” Lapalme has testified. One anonymous source has said that “many people jokingly mention that their first time really looking at an insect or touching one was because of Niloufar. She spreads a love for nature that is contagious. Her interest in conserving at-risk species reflects a moral compass that she followed closely: She cared about the universe and everything that was in it.”As a student, she studied coastal ecosystems, writing her Master’s thesis in 2012 on coral reefs and algal cover in Belize. While working with UNEP, she put her studies toward helping communities and ecosystems recover from disasters such as 2016’s cyclone Mathieu in Haiti, and toward reducing risks of hazards, such as floods and avalanches in the Koh-e Baba Mountains of Afghanistan and floods and gully erosion in the Lukaya River Basin of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has also studied anthropogenic involvement in the degradation of the Persian Gulf, and most recently, has done work with the Asiatic Cheetah. 

She and her colleagues at the PWHF were arrested and charged (some with espionage and some with “Corruption on Earth,” the latter including Bayani) while researching the Asiatic Cheetah, due to their use of camera traps in their research – despite the fact that camera traps are tools often used by wildlife researchers. She is missed and loved by her friends and family, by the entirety of the conservationist community, and surely by the population of Asiatic Cheetahs and our Earth itself. Biological conservationists need her intelligence and expertise, threatened and endangered populations need her care and compassion, the Earth as a whole needs her passion and love, and she needs her freedom.