It’s easy to make assumptions when you see Tina Chiarelli’s white-coat picture and academically rich bio under her title: Associate professor of medicine in the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. Yes, she’s a doctoral graduate. Yes, she’s a respected educator on human anatomy.
Now brace yourself. There’s another side to Chiarelli’s CV.
She’s bagged rattlesnakes in the Appalachians, collared Bengal tigers in India, tracked spiny crayfish in Australia, studied bats and fingernail-size coqui frogs in Puerto Rico and explored dangerous underwater caves in Florida. Chiarelli the reproductive physiologist is also Chiarelli the traveling elephant biologist.
“In the culture of medical academia, we tend to eat, breathe and sleep a singular subject,” she says. “So, when colleagues and students hear what I do they say, ‘Wow, that’s the coolest thing.’ In the context of health, I think it’s important to see the world from more than one dimension.”
Chiarelli’s adventures stretch back decades but have just recently drawn global attention. Since late 2022, she’s been selected as a fellow with the Explorers Club, the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. In April, she embarked on her most ambitious field mission to date. For three weeks, she had the honor of carrying one of only 242 Explorers Club flags in existence as she travels by jeep, bike, foot and on the backs of animals over a 2,000-kilometer path in Nepal. It’s a route that has never been trekked by humans, though it has often been followed by elephants. And that’s why her team of three — a guide, a guard and Chiarelli — is going.
“The pathway has been fragmented over the years and has heightened what we know as ‘the human-elephant conflict,’” she says. “Indigenous people have been resettled into these areas, but it’s placed them in these corridors that elephants have used for centuries to migrate. Deforestation has made the situation worse for people who have no other living options and for elephants trying to find shelter and food.”
To Chiarelli, it isn’t productive to ask which species belongs and which one is encroaching. She wants to move the human elephant conflict closer to human elephant solutions.
“It’s a pipedream to think landscapes and habitats will be replenished to what they once were,” she says, referring to the elephant population in Africa, which has declined from 3 million to 400,000, and Asia, where only 27,000 elephants remain. “There’s a push and pull on natural resources for human needs and elephant needs. Nothing will improve until we first reduce daily hardships on the people. When they’re no longer struggling for food, education and medical needs, then they can focus on being stewards of the environment.”
She believes the way forward can be found along the forgotten path.
Chiarelli makes this clear: She didn’t go to Nepal as a first-world academic.
“I would never tell [someone] what to do just because I have college degrees,” she says. “Assumptions don’t work in places like this.”
Even satellite imagery of the pathway has even been deceptive, showing what appears to be lush protective forest rejuvenated from mass clearing in the 1900s. The picture, however, is very different from the ground. The fast-growing trees planted mostly to be cut for infrastructure do not provide a protective canopy for elephants, leaving them to wander into farms and tribal villages. And so, Chiarelli will use only two research tools: a curious mind and a listening ear.
“There’s a caste system in that region of Nepal. People in lowest part of the caste have no voice. Many of them have no formal education and little contact with people outside their villages. They can give us a better understanding of what needs to change, but no one has gone in to listen to them and document what we call ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ — wisdom through storytelling — until now.”
Chiarelli knows firsthand what it’s like to live in challenging circumstances. She lived in a trailer while growing up in rural Maryland. Her mom and dad had to work just to get by, and never finished high school.
“There weren’t a lot of opportunities,” she says. “When I told a guidance counselor in high school that I planned to go to college, he said, ‘Why? College isn’t for people like you.’”
Chiarelli remembered those words, but never followed them. She’d already begun to uncover opportunities in nature. She climbed trees to look into birds’ nests and crawled among the undergrowth to find snakes.
“To me, it was an explorers paradise,” she says.
She didn’t know there could be any other place in the world until her grandfather gave her boxes of old National Geographic magazines. Inside one box she found a book, Through Hell And High Water, compiled by members of the Explorers Club. The world began to open for Chiarelli when she enrolled at West Virginia University, with plans of becoming a veterinarian. She loved learning, yet she didn’t allow school or being a woman to confine her.
“I always thought there was a bigger purpose out there for me, and I’d eventually find it,” Chiarelli says.
This quest led to an internship at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island. During her first rotation there, she worked with doctoral researchers trying to determine how a red panda’s health problems related to her reproductive cycle. The research opened Chiarelli’s eyes. The next rotation changed her life.
“I went to the elephant barn and everything just stopped,” she says. “I’d watch these elephants named Kate, Ginny and Alice comfort each other with their trunks. I saw them make people laugh. There’s a heartbreaking side to elephants in captivity, but once they’re here we have to give them the best care and move forward.”
Chiarelli never looked back. When she told a mentor that she wanted to work with elephants in their natural habitat, he said she’d have to find her own way to make it happen.
It was exactly what she wanted to hear.
“My overactive imagination has served me well in teaching and exploring. To me, the sky is always the limit.”
I must be watching someone else’s life. This is how Chiarelli feels whenever she goes to faraway places to live out of a backpack and document everything she sees.
“As [someone] who grew up in a trailer, every type of exploration has been like chasing dragons off the map for me,” she says. “When I take a step back, it’s surreal.”
The doctoral degree and white coat in Chiarelli’s bio are surreal, too.
“My overactive imagination has served me well in teaching and exploring. To me, the sky is always the limit,” she says.
And now here she is, carrying one of the Explorers Club flags that have been to the North Pole, South Pole, bottom of the oceans, summit of Mount Everest and to the moon. “Maybe a student or colleague who feels the odds are stacked against them will be inspired from knowing where I’ve been, where I am now and where I intend to go.”
