High Fives, Guys!

A friend asked me last week when I was going to post my next blog... I thought that today would be as good a time as any to jump back in. Especially because I have such great news: I have officially been awarded a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in support of my second field season. This means that I am officially headed back to KNP in January. There are no words to express how happy I am about this award! It’s kick-started my preparations for next season, which is always exciting! As soon as the flight is booked I’ll have a count-down going…
 
In other news, over the weekend, we held a small regional conference here at UNM: the 3rd Annual Meeting of the South Western Association of Biological Anthropologists. Lots of research came out of our lab and project and everyone who presented did an incredible job!
 
My best friend, M, won the prize for best talk, presenting a piece of her dissertation work about how we can use strontium isotopes to reconstruct landscape use among extinct taxa (for more information, check out this paper she co-authored). Labmate D gave an excellent talk updating us on his dissertation research and sharing his findings about the social strategies of adolescent male chimpanzees (here is a link to his abstract from the Biennial Meetings of the International Primatological Society last summer in Vietnam). And I presented some preliminary results from my research, adapting a technique from Machanda, Gilby, and Wrangham (2014) to determine if play partner preferences among immatures foreshadow adult patterns.
 
Oh, and I also won a prize for the best use of SWABA in a talk. No big deal.
 
So there’s been an up-tick in positive academic news in the last few weeks!