| I
was a graduate student in the
Neuroscience and Animal Behavior program in the Department
of Psychology at Emory University from 2000 to 2006. I
worked with Dr.
Frans de Waal and Dr. Harold
Gouzoules at the Living
Links Center of the Yerkes
National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
My Ph.D dissertation
focused on social communication in the great apes, and in
particular, gestural signaling. I looked at how chimpanzees
and bonobos use gestures in combination with other signals
such as facial expressions and vocalizations. Multimodal communication
has been investigated in many species, such as spiders, birds,
and fish, but little is known about how great apes combine
signal usage in non-experimental settings. We know much about
the ways in which humans gesture and vocalize at the same
time, and studying the same strategies in our closest relatives
may shed light on how we evolved to be such multimodal creatures.
I worked with several
captive social groups of bonobos (Pan paniscus) and
chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) for my research, which
was supported by The National Science Foundation, The Wenner-Gren
Foundation, and The Leakey Foundation.
I now work in science
advocacy in Washington, DC. Since May 2006, I have been the
director of government relations at the Association for Psychological
Science.
Further
research details
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