Michael Wilson

I was born in Minnesota and grew up in small towns in Illinois and Indiana. I spent much of my childhood watching animals and scouring the local library for books on gorillas, whales, dinosaurs, ocelots and platypuses. I majored in biology at the University of Chicago, where I started working for Jeanne and Stuart Altmann's Amboseli Baboon Project. After graduating I spent 10 months in Kenya habituating olive baboons at the Mpala Research Camp, where I lived in a tent on the banks of the Ewaso Ngiro river. Growing increasingly interested in using field studies of primates to improve our understanding of human evolution, I decided to focus on our closer cousins, chimpanzees. As a graduate student at Harvard, I studied intergroup aggression and vocal communication in the chimpanzees of the Kanyawara community in Kibale National Park, Uganda. I then spent two and a half years as a post-doctoral researcher with Anne Pusey, followed by three years based in Tanzania serving as the Director of Field Research for Gombe Stream Research Centre. In 2007, I returned to the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of the Anthropology Department , with a joint position in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. I am currently focusing on how the distribution and abundance of food resources affect the timing of intergroup interactions at both Gombe and Kanyawara. In addition to intergroup aggression, I have collaborated on a variety of projects, including disease ecology and conservation. My students work on a variety of topics on chimpanzees and baboons at Gombe as well as other species elsewhere.

Michael Wilson

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