Dr. Gowri Shankar, co-founder and Director of Kalinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology and Kalinga Foundation, environmental education, research and conservation organizations based in Agumbe, Karnataka. For close to two decades, he has been studying king cobras as a wildlife biologist and has completed his Doctorate from Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University, formerly North Orissa University (NOU), Odisha, India. He has also been an exchange student at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Recently, Gowri Shankar made a groundbreaking discovery about the presence of four species of king cobras, as opposed to the previously believed one, which has been the norm for the last 185 years.