“WELCOME TO THE DPG”

You’ve heard a lot about Claire Dearing, our fearless founder of the DPG, but other members of the organization are just as important. People like… us! We’re Zia Rodriguez and Franklin Webb, two of the earliest, eager-est additions to the team.

Zia: I’ll go first. I’m Zia, the in-house paleo-vet. I grew up in Seattle and spent my childhood looking after animals, including my cat Kizzy. Fast-forward a few years--I trained in pre-veterinary medicine at Berkeley hoping to work in dino-healthcare at Jurassic World, but never ended up setting foot on Isla Nublar. That is, I accepted an internship at the park right before InGen and Masrani Global decided to create...well, you know what happened. Here’s my super #1 passion: bringing the subject of dino-health to the public. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel super lucky to be the one who can help teach people about the subject and help keep the dinosaurs alive. (Look out for a future article about the importance of dino-vets!) Well, that’s my bit. Franklin?

Franklin: Well, I didn’t have a cat, but as a kid in Los Angeles, I’d take apart old computers to see how they worked, and later channeled that interest into a passion for coding and web design. When I started at Jurassic World, I was first posted at an off-site tech complex in Irvine, CA, monitoring their private network for glitches. I didn’t actually get to the island for a while which was OK since, to tell the truth, I’m actually kind of afraid of dinosaurs. Still, no one can convince me that they don’t have just as much right to exist as any shark or spider out there. Beyond the cool tech stuff, my favorite thing about the job is seeing how fascinated kids are by the dinosaurs, how they understand the dangers of letting these beautiful animals die. Their enthusiasm gives me hope every day. Oh, almost forgot, I’m the team’s Systems Analyst!

So, in summation, we just want to say that the DPG is really just made up of ordinary people – ordinary people who are committed to Claire’s vision and dedicated to saving the world’s most extraordinary animals.