Dr Gabriella Kountourides is an anthropologist and zoologist fascinated by what makes humans and other animals tick, and how we came to be the way we are.
Her fieldwork has taken her across species and continents. In Kenya, she researched rhinos and ways to reduce conflict between people and wildlife. In Thailand, she spent five months in the far north and deep south of the country, interviewing women about drug harm reduction. Her research has also taken her to Bolivia and South Africa, while closer to home she has conducted interviews inside UK prisons.
Gabriella completed her doctorate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Oxford, researching premenstrual health through a combination of lab work, large-scale surveys, and coding. She remains a research affiliate in Oxford’s Department of Anthropology, where she has taught human evolution, culture and behaviour. Before her doctorate, she studied zoology and primatology.
Today, more than 100,000 people follow Gabriella as 'gabriellaexplains' across social media, where she creates videos exploring wildlife and human evolution. In 2024, she won a Webby Award for a short BBC film about her PhD research. She has also worked as a researcher on a BBC and PBS documentary, is part of the BBC Expert Women scheme and belongs to the science communication collective Those Nerdy Girls.
When Gabriella isn’t in the field or in front of the camera, you’ll find her practising martial arts or wrangling her pet rabbit (maybe the most vicious of all the animals she’s worked with!).
