Introducing

Jen Maxfield Ostfeld


Jen Maxfield is an Emmy-award winning reporter and anchor who has covered New York and New Jersey for two decades, currently for NBC New York. Maxfield’s first book, More After the Break: A Reporter Returns to Ten Unforgettable News Stories was published in 2022 and was an instant Amazon bestseller.

Since 2003, she has worked extensively with the Forest Departments in many states; Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and have students who work in West Bengal, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Punjab. She has held trainings for handling wildlife emergencies in collaboration with them, and held media workshops across many states to engage with the media for better reporting of human wildlife interactions. Currently she is a supervisor and co-supervisor of three PhD students in various stages of submission of their theses.

She has taught courses at the MSc Wildlife course at the National Centre of Biological Sciences, Bangalore. She has also been part of policy documents related to human leopard conflict in multiple states in India as well as in central government policy documents.

She is also part of the IUCN human wildlife conflict and coexistence task force group. Increasingly her focus of interest has moved away from wildlife biology to better understand nature culture relationships and its role in enabling spaces that are shared between people and wildlife.