David W. Macdonald is the University of Oxford's first professor of wildlife conservation and founder, in 1986, of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). He holds a Professorial Research Fellowship in wildlife conservation at Oxford college Lady Margaret Hall and was the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, visiting professor at Imperial College and Liverpool University, and emeritus fellow of the IUCN's Survival Service Commission. Macdonald is known for his television documentaries, including the BAFTA-finalist Night of the Fox, as well as The Velvet Claw: A Natural History of Carnivores and Meerkats United, all for BBC. Among his many books, he is the author of Running with the Fox and European Mammals, the editor of The Encyclopedia of Mammals, and coeditor of the definitive book on canids, The Biology and Conservation of Wild Canids.