Trang Nguyen founded WildAct in 2012 to engage young people in Vietnam with wildlife conservation.
Today the organisation’s mission is to inspire, motivate and empower engagement in science-based conservation of threatened species and ecosystems. The organisation has set up 10 wildlife libraries benefitting over 30,000 students, and led to more than 1,600 km of forests being patrolled with over 1,500 traps removed.
Nguyen is a wildlife conservation scientist and practitioner, with a specialist focus on combating illegal trade in wildlife products between Africa and Asia. Having worked on both continents, Nguyen has experienced the communication and knowledge gaps about illegal trade which exist between Africa, as the source of wildlife products, and Asia, as the end market. She considers this a major threat to conservation efforts, and so her work seeks to combat the crisis while working to improve shared knowledge and communication.
She was born and raised in Vietnam, where she defied convention to enter the sector. In her TedX talk in 2018, she recalled how she began writing to NGOs asking for work experience when she was just 8 years old. “I didn’t give up. I keep being persistent. I write them every day, every month. I write to them year after year. When I was 14, I got a letter back and they said okay, you seem to be determined. If you want, you can come over and help us out with one of our education projects.”
In 2014, Trang Nguyen was awarded an MPhil in Conservation Leadership from Cambridge University, followed by a PhD in Biodiversity Management at the University of Kent, UK, which she completed in 2018. She was awarded a Future for Nature award in 2018 and in 2019 the BBC named her as one of the world’s most influential women. In 2022, Nguyen received the Princess of Girona Foundation Award.