Katie Moore

Katie Moore never forgot the first time she saw a stranded dolphin on the beach. She knew she had to take action. And for the last two decades, that’s exactly what she has done.

While in graduate school in North Carolina, Katie volunteered as a marine mammal rescue responder in between classes. After graduation, she continued volunteering, earning money waiting tables at a restaurant and teaching at a local aquarium to pay the bills. She eventually earned a position responding to strandings for NOAA in NC, then went on to run the Cape Cod Stranding Network (CCSN), where she led efforts to save stranded dolphins, porpoises, seals and whales in one of the busiest areas in the world for marine mammal strandings. In 2007, Katie led CCSN’s merger with IFAW, and became the Manager of the Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Program.

Katie pioneered the first systematic, successful mass stranding prevention program in the world while improving the care and diagnostic process for those animals that were stranded. Through faster response times and better treatment practices, release rates on Cape Cod jumped from less than 14 percent to over 70 percent. She and her team also challenged the consensus that individually stranded dolphins should be euthanized. By developing an innovative study to track released animals, Katie proved that individual animals could survive on their own. These results changed rescue procedures in the field and saved the lives of hundreds of stranded animals.

In 2013, when Katie became the Director of Animal Rescue, she applied the lessons that she learned on Cape Cod—namely, that science matters and individual animals matter, too—to situations such as responding to typhoons in the Philippines, rescuing elephants in Zambia, and rehabilitating Siberian Tigers in Russia.

Today, as the Deputy Vice President of Animal Rescue, Katie, with her wealth of past experience, is helping plan the future of IFAW’s rescue and rehabilitation efforts. She has worked with partner organizations—from the Wildlife Trust of India to NASA to local communities in Myanmar—in over 15 countries, and she regularly advises emergency rescue efforts around the world.

Katie has a Bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Wheaton College, and a Master’s degree in environmental management from Duke University.