my research interests revolve around
maternal and infant health infant growth
and development
and the use of different types of
approaches from endocrinology or the
study of hormones
as tools that we can use to answer
questions about human biology.
i also teach a number of graduate level
courses some of them
include things like evolutionary
medicine mothers babies and food
and hormones and behavior i'm the
principal investigator of a project
that we're calling hero g and that's an
acronym that stands for hormonal and
epigenetic regulators of growth
what this project did is we followed
moms from very early pregnancy
we took ultrasound measures of their
baby's growth during gestation
and then starting when those babies were
week old we measured them
every other day until they were a year
old the study
is taking place in rural west africa so
in a place of the world where
we truly don't know very much about how
children grow yet this is probably one
of the most important questions we can
ask
when we're trying to figure out how
might we get them to grow better
my research interests focus on
conservation of primates in southeast
asia
specifically and more broadly
biodiversity conservation in general
primate evolutionary biology is probably
my favorite class to teach
that's a course that focuses on the
natural history of our order
and it jumps back and forth between
modern animals and extinct animals the
modern animals inform us on how we can
interpret the
biology behavior of extinct creatures
and the extinct creatures provide as a
framework for understanding
natural history i've been working over
the last 15 years on
a conservation program for a
critically endangered animal called the
tonka stumnos monkey lives in
northernmost vietnam
has a global population of more than 250
animals
is not held in captivity anywhere in the
world
and it's an animal on the brink of
extinction and i'll be going to hanoi in
vietnam and
in about six weeks where we'll be
talking about central government to
establish
a countrywide conservation action plan
for the species
i'm very interested in how anthropogenic
effects and climate effects are
affecting
primate ecology and behavior so i study
lemurs as well as bush babies and trying
to look at sort of how
human induced as well as natural
variability affects their behavior in
ecology
i teach a course on primate behavior so
if students are really interested
in understanding not just about primates
but actually how we are primates as well
and that we fit in that primate order
they get a lot of chances to learn
how to understand themselves better as
well as
primates in general so my current
research project is in south africa
and it's at a site it's a high altitude
site so it's actually very cold
and temperate it's not like a tropical
environment we know about you know
primates that live in tropical
environments but we know very little
about how primates
are able to exist in places where it
actually gets really cold we're using a
lot of
kind of high tech technology
assess their thermoregulation in terms
of using these kind of high
and thermal cameras because we know the
environment is either getting colder and
some
places are warmer in other places we're
trying to get insight into how
the primates are able to actually deal
with that kind of variability that's
coming
more and more into our reality i'm
interested in the
ecology of animals large and small
of africa both living ones and the ones
that
um have been long dead i teach intro to
biological anthropology
early homonym paleontology which is sort
of about the
environmental the ecological
circumstances of human evolution
i teach courses on the human fossil
record one of the big projects that i'm
really excited about is we're trying to
develop
new ways to improve our ability to do
radiocarbon dating
and various types of paleo dietary
analysis maybe even
paleogenetics right now people often
have to spend
days weeks even months preparing bones
at sites to try to figure out
oh what are these few that are actually
going to work
right for radiocarbon dating we want to
replace the work of months
to an afternoon in doing so we could
really change i think the kinds of
questions we ultimately can ask of
collections
one distinctive aspect about our program
is we do have a common theme
of the environment and ecology so that
while we may be talking about the teeth
of australopithecines from
two million years ago or talking about
modern humans living in the gambia we
have a common theme of ecology
i think we have a really dynamic faculty
and they again
have strengths in so many different
areas we're extremely
field oriented and very active we're not
a bunch for sitting around
as if they're people who want to get out
there be very field active
you know we're we're a good department
from that perspective in addition our
faculty are engaging in hands-on
research that really matters not only
within our discipline but within the
world more broadly so for students to be
able to understand how you connect these
big questions in the classroom with
doing something about it in the real
world that's what they could get here at
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