What type of research are you working in?

In the past I have worked as a field researcher in Cameroon (twice) and St. Catherines Island, Georgia. In Cameroon I was focused on conservation by disabling snare traps placed by local hunters to kill chimpanzees and gorillas. The area of Cameroon I was working in is host to the two rarest subspecies of great ape in the world: the Cross River Gorilla and the Cameroon-Nigeria Chimpanzee. There are fewer than 300 Cross River Gorillas in the world and only two recorded wild sightings of them in history. You may seen one of these videos. It actually may be too late to do anything about keeping this subspecies alive without crossbreeding with other subspecies (which I am not against at all). The second time I was in Cameroon I was collecting my own data on chimpanzee nesting patterns in order to understand what ecological pressures can a) tell us about whether they are under hunting stress and b) tell us what pressures may have caused our own ancestors to start nesting terrestrially (as opposed to arboreally).

In St. Catherines I was there studying ring-tailed lemurs, and this project was basically designed for me by my current graduate supervisor. I had to be nocturnal for a month in order to help other researchers understand the evolution of primate sleeping patterns. I collected the first nocturnal behavioural data of ring-tailed lemurs in the wild and my thesis (just finished) is on the evolution of cathemerality. Yay?!

In the future, I want to go back to studying great apes and/or become a popular science writer.

Do you enjoy it? If so, what do you enjoy about it?

I really enjoyed my field experiences. I love it because I get to do things that have really never been done before (or if they have been done, only by a handful of people). When I was in Cameroon sitting in gorilla nests it felt like I was reaching back across 6 million years of evolution and searching for my own roots - at least that is what I imagined). I felt an amazing rush everytime we came close to contacting the apes themselves and realized that it was the first time these apes had ever encountered a non-African human. Many of my Cameroonian field guides suspected they were terrified of me because of my white skin.

I also just love collecting data and producing research. I love discovering new things and broadening human knowledge of our world. A life filled with research would be a happy life for me.

Do you think there are enough resources allocated towards science, medical research in the US and elsewhere? How would you change the process for receiving funding? Does it work?

I can't speak about science resource allocation in the U.S. But I can speak on the broken aspects of the Canadian system for my work. I get funded by NSERC, which is funding for natural science research. However, as an evolutionary anthropologist NSERC does not know what to do with me (us). There is no category for human evolution/primatology research and so our research usually gets reviewed by people that are not experts in our field. It makes no sense to have someone who studies fish or forest ecology to review my research because it is too far detached from their area of expertise. In the future I hope NSERC creates a category specifically for us. The reason there isn't one is historically contingent on evolutionary anthropology being lumped in with other anthropologists, who apply for different social science grants (SSHRC).

Oh, I can also comment on the transition to funding for STEM sciences because that effects me. Because governments are only putting money towards STEM sciences (e.g., science, technology, engineering, mathematics), I have to alter what research I do in the future. In the past, I have specifically focused on evolutionary theory (e.g., origin of human bipedality and the development of primate sleeping patterns, etc.), but that is not the "type of science" that is included in STEM science. They want science that has a practical application. So for my PHD I am proposing to research disease transmission between chimpanzees and humans. I think that is interesting anyway, so I don't care. But we are getting away from doing research on purely academic type questions. And that disappoints me because I love learning about how we became human.