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I have always loved animals. As soon as I realized I could make
a living watching and learning about animals, that's what I
set out to do. As an undergraduate at the University of Rhode
Island and in early graduate school at the University of Minnesota,
I studied loggerhead sea turtles, turkey vultures, Columbian
ground squirrels and red squirrels. Then my advisors suggested
using the long-term data on Gombe chimpanzees for a thesis project,
and I was off.
There was a lot of work to be done: paper data needed to be
sorted and entered, we had to devise ways to get the entered
data checked and into analyzable formats, and then I spent a
dizzying period poking around in the data, figuring out what
kinds of patterns were hidden in there. I eventually settled
on a few related topics for my thesis. I investigated male territoriality
and the role of females in chimpanzee community structure; female
space use in relation to how they associate with males and each
other; and how factors such as dominance rank and age of offspring
influence how social females are, and who they spend time with.
I am taking some time off full-time science to raise the next
generation of animal lovers, while I continue to work on papers.
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