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 baboons at the Mpala
Research Center, where I lived in a tent on the banks of the
Ewaso Ngiro river. Mpala is home to hundreds of wild animals,
including elephants, buffalo, giraffe, hippos, lions, hyenas,
leopards, and cheetahs. It was fantastic following baboons around
in wild Africa. While working there I found myself increasingly
fascinated by vocal communication, social organization, and other
ways in which the study of wild primates can improve our understanding
of human evolution.
After another year back in Chicago managing and analyzing
baboon data, I began graduate studies at the Anthropology
Department at Harvard. Working with Richard
Wrangham and Marc
Hauser, I studied intergroup
aggression and vocal
communication in the chimpanzees of Kibale
National Park, Uganda. Kibale is a beautiful place, and
it was such a privilege to follow our closest living relatives
through their forest world.
After graduate school, I spent two and a half years as a post-doctoral
researcher with Anne Pusey studying intergroup aggression among
Gombe chimpanzees. Working at both Minnesota and Gombe, I began
a project that looks at both long-term data collected during
the past 30 years and new data from ongoing research at Gombe.
This project seeks to improve our understanding of why the frequency
of intergroup aggression varies over time, and also explores
other issues, such as the relation between intergroup aggression
and territory
expansion. I am now based in Tanzania, where I am continuing
my work on intergroup aggression while serving as the Director
of Field Research for Gombe Stream Research Centre. Working
at Gombe, I have become increasingly involved in conservation
issues, including finding ways to address the two major threats
to Gombe’s chimpanzees: disease and habitat loss. The park is
tiny and faces many threats, but if we take action now, we can
save Gombe and its famous, well-studied chimpanzees.
Related Links
Michael's
chimpanzee vocal playback experiments
Michael's
pages on chimpanzee vocalization
Michael and Lilean
Pintea's visualization of chimpanzee territory over time |
