Minnows © Michel Roggo

Mike Baltzer, Executive Director

Mike is a conservation biologist with over 30 years of experience in Asia, Africa and Europe. He started his career undertaking and leading biological inventory expeditions in Uganda, Vietnam and Indonesia. He since specialised in leading large, complex, multi-country focused conservation programmes. For more than 18 years, he worked for WWF as the Conservation Director for their Greater Mekong Programme, Director of the Danube-Carpathian Programme and was for nine years the Lead for their global tiger programme, Tigers Alive. Mike left WWF in 2018 to launch a new partnership he conceived and founded focused on freshwater fish, SHOAL.

Michael Edmondstone, Communications and Engagement Lead

Over the past 15 years, Michael has worked across a range of communications roles, including as a journalist in Tanzania, and marketing manager in a media agency. After spending the best part of a decade in the corporate sector, he joined an environmental NGO as a communications officer, where he felt he could better make a positive difference to the challenges facing the natural world. He joined SHOAL in 2020 and enjoys the challenge of drawing attention to freshwater species that have historically been overlooked. 

Dr. Harmony Patricio, Conservation Programme Manager

Dr. Harmony Patricio leads the development and roll-out of SHOAL in the U.S. and manages freshwater fish conservation programs, in partnership with Re:wild and the IUCN SSC Freshwater Fish Specialist Group. Harmony has over 13 years of experience in conservation research, practice, and policy. She specialises in freshwater biodiversity, and has worked in Australia, Central America, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. She spent six years designing and implementing freshwater fish conservation programmes in the Mekong River Basin, in close collaboration with rural fishing communities, and established the Mekong Fish Network. Her Ph.D. research focused on the development of novel environmental DNA methods to assess river biodiversity and determine distributions of rare fishes, including the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish. Harmony serves on the Freshwater Conservation Committee and Freshwater Fish Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. She is also the Co-Chair of the Freshwater Specialist Group for the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.