People

Susan Alberts

Susan C. Alberts
Institution: Duke University

Susan C. Alberts received a PhD in 1992 from the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Her advisor was Jeanne Altman. Since 1998 she has been faculty in the Department of Biology at Duke University. She also serves as Associate Director of Science and Synthesis at NESCent and co-directs the Amboseli Baboon Research Project with Jeanne Altmann, Princeton University. Susan has recently been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Susan's work focuses on how and why animal behavior - the primary means by which animals adapt to and exploit their environment - has evolved, studying two populations of large mammals for which detailed life histories are available and observation conditions are very good: the savannah baboon and the elephant in Amboseli National Park, southern Kenya.

The Amboseli baboon and elephant are among the best-studied mammal populations in the world, having been subjects of ongoing research for more than two decades, thus provide exceptional opportunities for understanding the relationships between social behavior, relatedness, and population genetic structure.

Susan's research at Duke investigates three major topics: 
- the importance of expression of kin relationships; 
- the importance of dominance relationships;
- behavioral responses to environmental change.

Her own work focuses on baboons, one of the most abundant and wide-spread species of monkey in Africa and close evolutionary relatives to humans (on average, baboons and humans have a genetic similarity of 94%). An example of her research is a recent PNAS paper where she addresses the question of early reproductive aging as a uniquely human trait, using datasets on seven nonhuman primate species in wild populations to show that the human pattern is generally absent in other primates. Susan received the 2019 Distinguished Primatologist Award from the American Society of Primatologists.

Want to learn more about baboons and Susan's work? Check out her website and the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. She discusses her work at length in a recent interview after winning the Distinguished Primatologist Award from the American Society of Primatologists.