Cindy
spent a year working on the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in 2004-5.
In 2005 she received an NSF graduate fellowship and was admitted to
graduate school in the University of Chicago’s Comparative Human
Development program, where she received her Ph.D. in 2011. For her
graduate work, she established a field project on mating behavior in
pig-tailed macaques in Thailand.
Here Cindy describes her current research program:
'My graduate work was on postcopulatory sexual selection in pigtail macaques, where I studied female copulation calls. The major findings were that The calls attract males (often subordinate to the female's current partner) although those males do not seem to be able to act on this to copulate with, or even interact with, the female. For the most part, high-ranking females called for a higher percentage of copulations than did middle- or low-ranking females, but there were a few notable exceptions. I jokingly comment that those exceptions were females that thought a lot of themselves, but what I want to do next with my data is a social network analysis to see if maybe some measure of connectedness or centrality in the network was able to overcome the effect of rank. I would also like to eventually expand this to look at social network position and how it changes with age, also any correlates to chronic stress. I collected fecal hormones in the field, and analyzed them at Lincoln Park Zoo as a part of my graduate research, so I have experience collecting samples for purposes other than paternity analysis, as well as time spent working in partnership with a zoo.'
