Prof Karen Stockin has been the Research Lead for CERG since 2009 and has recently completed a Royal Society Te Aparangi Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (2019-2025) based at the School of Natural Sciences.

Karen's research interests interface animal welfare science, ethology and veterinary pathology and are particularly focused on human impacts that affect cetacean populations. Karen has supervised to successful completion close to 30 postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows and leads the Cetacean Pathology Unit (CPU) based at Massey University's Auckland campus. Karen is additionally an Associate Investigator of the Animal Welfare Science and Bioethics Centre and WILDBASE at the School of Veterinary Science at the Manawatu campus.

In addition to her roles at Massey University, Karen serves as the Chair of the Society for Marine Mammalogy Ethics Advisory Committee and was the inaugural Strandings Coordinator (2018-2020) for the International Whaling Commission (IWC), where she presently serves on the IWC Strandings Initiative Expert Panel and is a member of the IWC Scientific Committee.