https://joannabagniewska.com/Dr Joanna Bagniewska received her BSc in Biology from Constructor University in Germany, then moved to the UK to pursue her MSc in Biology at the University of Oxford, and went on to do a DPhil in Zoology at Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.
Joanna is a Departmental Lecturer in Environmental Science and the Co-Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques; she is also a Departmental Lecturer in the Graduate School. Her interests centre on ecology and conservation biology as well as teaching and communication, and her career encompasses all of these.
Alongside her academic work, Joanna is an accomplished science communicator, having won British Council’s FameLab Poland and the Wellcome-funded “I’m a Scientist, get me out of here!”, given a TEDx talk, and performed at science stand-up comedy events. For six years, she held the post of Communications and Public Engagement Officer at Oxford University’s Department of Paediatrics – a particularly exciting experience during the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. She regularly writes popular science articles for various media, both in Polish (including Focus, Gazeta Wyborcza and Tygodnik Powszechny) and English (BBC Wildlife, The Times Literary Supplement), and has collaborated with the Discovery Channel on the “How Do They Do It?” series.
Additionally, as part of the POP Science network, Joanna advises the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education on international collaboration in public engagement with research.
Joanna’s first popular science book, The Modern Bestiary, was published in 2022 by Wildfire (UK) and Smithsonian Books (US); it has since been translated into Korean, Mandarin and Polish. She is also a contributor to the children’s book Life: The Wild Wonders of Biodiversity (Thames&Hudson, 2025).
