As a kid growing up in Bushwick, Brooklyn Cynthia Malone was fascinated with monkeys, apes, and tropical forests. That curiosity led her to attending a program at her dream school of the University of Oxford while still in high school, a master’s degree from Columbia University and now she is making plans to return to Oxford, having been accepted to the school’s PhD program.
“It was almost like wanting to be an astronaut. There was nobody around me that did anything like that,” said Malone, 36, an ecologist, activist, and artist who is seeking to change the thinking about often overlooked racism in science. Eventually, she was able to study in Africa and draw historical connections to how white supremacy and colonization have disrupted lands and how humanity’s relationship with wildlife has been fractured, as well. “It really showed me how conservation itself has acted as a tool of colonialism.”
Having studied wildlife and working with Black and Indigenous communities across the globe, including Guyana, Grenada, Cameroon, and the Solomon Islands for more than 15 years, Malone now hopes to pursue a Ph.D. at Oxford in the School of Geography and the Environment. Her aim is to continue her project, “Decolonizing the Wild in the Land of Many Waters,” which examines ancestral archives and Black and Indigenous cosmologies in the Caribbean and Guyana, where she herself has roots.
However, she says her work to decolonize science and ecology, the study of how living organisms interact with one another and with their environment, along with her activism for Black lives throughout the 2010s left her “blackballed” and shut out from many jobs and opportunities, compared to her peers, to the point where she even experienced homelessness.
“A lot of these things, I was bringing into the space, and people would be like, ‘you’re too radical … This has nothing to do with the sciences,’” Malone said.
Around 2015, Malone co-founded the Society for Conservation Biology’s Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee, and helped create initiatives with a similar lens with the American Museum of Natural History. In both spaces, she says she encountered pushback from leadership, including initiatives focused on using inclusive pronouns. She also experienced it in her research, because she says connecting social and physical sciences was not generally accepted or respected in ecology.
One of the demonstrations Malone took part in at the American Museum of Natural History was in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals and the Hall of African Peoples. Soon after, she noticed that she was no longer listed as a visiting scientist for the museum and found it difficult to find work opportunities compared to her peers.
“It was essentially like an exile,” Malone said. “It was hard for me to get a job. I didn’t have a place to live … It was really bad. There was no safety net. There wasn’t really a stable place for me to stay … There was no emergency money. I didn’t have any family support in that way.”
But Malone remained undaunted. Instead of giving up, she embarked on her current project in 2017 when she began tracing her Guyanese roots and looking at wildlife in the country. She returned to New York in May 2026, after having lived in Barbados and other Caribbean islands and is now looking to gather funds to return to Oxford. Since 2020, she has also continued to return intermittently to Guyana to build out her current project, archiving her family history.
She says she is in critical need of funding to present at the university by the end of August, between tuition and living costs, needing up to $88,000. She created a GoFundMe where people can donate.
In addition, Malone has delivered keynote addresses at Yale, New York University, and the University of the West Indies. She was recognized by Grist as one of the 50 Fixers for advancing equity in STEM. In 2018, she published an article with VICE, titled “The Future of Science is Black,” where she wrote, “Black scientists invested in doing science differently must build community with Black activists, who have honed the art of organized disruption, unapologetically declaring that ‘Black Lives Matter’ as we reclaim our rightful place in scientific history.”
She is now preparing to present research as part of the TEDxAmazonia series on Aug. 30.
Despite her struggles, Malone remains passionate about the work of social and ecological justice in the sciences. “When I reflect on my particular role and journey, it’s like I’m able to see the world that I helped to open up, even if I’m not recognized for it,” she said.
