Mikel Maria Delgado is a Certified Cat Behavior Consultant and worked as a full time Cat Behavior Specialist at the San Francisco SPCA for several years before co-founding Feline Minds. She has been interviewed for Cat Fancy, the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and the Huffington Post and has done presentations on cat behavior at the Bay Area Pet Fair and the Exploratorium Museum of Science. Mikel is currently a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley in the Psychology Department, where she studies animal behavior, and human-pet relationships. She has presented research on the welfare of laboratory pigeons, human attitudes about domestic cats, learning in zebrafish and pigeons, and emotions and decision making in squirrels at several academic conferences. She served on the Board of Directors for the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants for four years, and is a former Co-Chair of their Cat Division. Mikel also co-runs the website Food Puzzles For Cats. She lives in Berkeley with her boyfriend and their two rescue cats.