Our People

Dr Joanna Bagniewska

Ordinary Fellow

Departmental Lecturer in Environmental Science, Departmental Lecturer in the Graduate School

Oxford Lifelong Learning

BSc Constructor University, MSc, Dphil Oxf, PGCE Reading

Dr Joanna Bagniewska is a Departmental Lecturer in Environmental Science and in the Graduate School at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. She is the Co-Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques; her interests centre on ecology, teaching and science communication, and her career encompasses all three.

Joanna’s expertise lies in behavioural ecology and biodiversity conservation. She has a soft spot for mammals, having worked on the American mink during her doctorate (as well as jackals, foxes, wombats and mole-rats before that) – though she does take an interest in other taxonomic groups.

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, performed at science stand-up comedy events, and written numerous popular science articles in English and Polish. Her first book, The Modern Bestiary, was published in 2022 by Wildfire (UK) and Smithsonian Books (US). She is also the co-author of The Communicating Scientist: A Practical Handbook (Springer Nature, 2025), and a contributor to the children’s book Life: The Wild Wonders of Biodiversity(Thames&Hudson, 2025).