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I study the evolution, development, and life course of social ties and their health and fitness consequences in primates. I aim to investigate how the costs and benefits of social integration vary and how cumulative experiences take shape physiologically over an individual’s lifetime. To do this in wild primates, my research typically capitalizes on the rare opportunity (and challenge) to use long-term field studies to determine how individuals manage the costs and benefits of sociality over a long life course.
My current work focuses on building non-human primate models of human health inequalities. I pursue this with captive and wild populations of non-human primates, and also collaboratively with a cross-species perspective. I am open to recruiting and supervising graduate students that wish to collaborate on my current projects and/or wish to pursue related research at other field sites. My doctoral training was in evolutionary primatology at Columbia University, where I worked with Marina Cords. In my dissertation on blue monkeys living in Kakamega Forest Kenya, I evaluated short-term correlates of social ties during development, including energy balance and glucocorticoids, and the early-life development of sociality broadly. I analyzed biological markers in collaboration with several labs, including James Higham at New York University, Erin Vogel at Rutgers University, and Michael Heistermann at the German Primate Center. For my dissertation, I also examined the short and long-term links between social ties and mortality in adult females. In my postdoctoral research, I expanded my research program to focus on a different life stage: senescence. I evaluated age-related changes oxidative stress and and social network integration in wild chimpanzees, working with Melissa Emery Thompson in the CHmPP lab at University of New Mexico. |