Lunch Break Science #25 | Nicole Thompson González

hello everyone and welcome to lunch break science i'm ariel johnson from the leaky foundation a non-profit dedicated to supporting human evolution research and sharing discoveries in programs like this we'd like to thank the annan gordon getty foundation and camilla and george smith whose generous support made this episode of lunch break science possible here with us today is leaky foundation grant recipient nicole thompson gonzalez nicole thank you so much for being with us thanks so much for having me arielle it's a real pleasure uh nicole is joining us from new mexico where she is a national institutes of health institutional research and career development award post doctoral fellow at the university of new mexico i got it you got it like they're specifically designed to be hard to say they're very impressive so um nicole uh researches the evolution and development of social ties and the impact that they have on health and fitness this research takes her to the kakamega forest in kenya to study blue monkey social ties during development so here's our little map with a beautiful little blue monkey yeah and the kabale national park in uganda to study the impact of social ties on stress and health of chimpanzees there they are yeah today she discusses the relationship between social ties health and fitness before we get started though uh if you have any questions for nicole during the episode please be sure to submit them on youtube facebook or twitter into the chat or on our leakey foundation live website and nicole will be answering those live during the episode the earlier you get those questions in the more likely she will be able to answer them my first question for you is what do social ties have to do with health and fitness it's a great question and the short answer to that is a lot but the long answer first starting with just social living in general uh that's just living in a social group is a really old old solution to securing resources and finding safety and numbers from predators but social ties which are what i'm really interested in are something a little bit more specific and that's where individuals have social partner preferences that endure over time and those social ties have the potential for tons of rewards so like cooperation reciprocity tolerance support in social species ties really give individuals an advantage along a number of different routes that are super important to fitness and just for example things like monopolizing resources and mates or increasing power and dominance there's really good evidence for both of those pathways ties are also really valuable for accessing important information like whether there's a predator nearby or for you and me if a job is available uh just one basic but super important thing that ties can do is um help maintain a secure and stable environment so just maintaining that secure environment is incredibly important for many many social species health and very much for humans so that's really relevant for our cardiovascular metabolic and immunological function so it's impossible though to figure out what ties uh and or health have to do with fitness without data from long-term studies yeah why why are long-term field sites so important so in in field biology long-term field studies are really the backbone of understanding the biology and ecology of any kind of long-lived species so you need data from individuals at all ages in all seasons and ideally in multiple environmental contexts to really understand what is this species what are the many ways it lives and what is important to its life so basically what helps it survive and reproduce to get at those data you need to collect data for a really long time um yeah go ahead yeah the um the leaky foundation understands the incredible value of long-term field sites and more and more now we're seeing you know long-term primary research sites being impacted by gaps in funding and emergencies so the leaky foundation created the primate research fund as a lifeline for these programs if you're interested in learning more about the primary research fund we've actually shared a link in the chat please check it out especially if you feel like your research site is experiencing these kind of circumstances that's really incredible that you guys are setting that up because i mean it just takes so much work it really takes a team to run these long-term sites so here you can see this is uh the kabali chimpanzee project team some members of it um and this is out in the field all the people who are collecting data on chimpanzees and have been you know day in day out blood sweat and tears working for for decades uh here this is the kakamega monkey project run by marina cords and her core team again i mean it's just it's so much work um and on the flip side i don't think that what we saw here was that when you have that much data coming in it really takes a team effort to organize the data so i mean we're bringing biological samples into the laboratory feces and urine and when you're doing that for years and years and years you really have to set up these organizational systems so this is the kcp organizing party that we literally do whenever we have to bring in hundreds and hundreds of samples from the field that that sounds actually kind of fun we turn it into a party we make it fun it's it's uh it's a real challenge to to get those babies put away before they fall so you gotta make it fun absolutely um so last month i called on my lunch break science friends to help us raise money for women's history month and you all came through you helped us raise over thirteen thousand dollars towards research um this month we have a you know thanks to ann and jeff magincalda and the anna gordon getty foundation we have another quadruple match challenge so the way this works you can visit the link we've shared in the chat and your donation to the primary research fund will be quadruple matched so if you donate dollars that will have a hundred dollars of impact if you donate two hundred fifty dollars i'll have a thousand dollars of impact that will help maintain long-term research sites protect vulnerable populations and also help support the local staff members that are at the primate sites um so definitely uh we shared a link in the chat so we really just appreciate any help you can give us working at a long-term site and with long-term data is really important to kind of research you do yeah and we have not heard about blue monkeys before on lunch break science can can you tell us about them well that's such a shame i'm glad i can fix that problem yeah well uh blue monkeys uh are a species with several subspecies but they occur all across uh east africa in several locations um their social organization um has uh adult females that are phylopatric to their group so basically they stay in the group that they were born in for their entire lives um whereas males juveniles uh they end up dispersing right before they reach reproductive age and the final membership of the group is a single resident male and multiple adult females and their dependent offspring and juveniles so really adult females create the core social uh unit of a blue monkey group similar to a lot of other cercopithecoid or old world monkey species like baboons manga bees red tail monkeys all that and what what do blue monkey social interactions look like well their their social interactions are really similar to a lot of other animals generally so some of their friendly behavior includes basic things like physical contact and huddling so that's super important for thermal regulation and also just senses of security they'll often do that after they get into a fight or something like that similarly a sense of bond building and reassurance is a behavior grooming super popular uh everybody's doing it and that's does a lot more than just clean fur um it has a lot more benefits than just hygiene it can it really characterizes the the strength of of the ties that we tend to measure between individuals and it predicts predicts things like uh reciprocal exchanges and and even coalition formation so and speaking of coalitions um that is uh one of the most interesting behaviors in my opinion of what adult female blue monkeys do and that is they cooperatively defend their territory so i think you'll be able to see it in this video all right so these uh magnificent shadows high high up in the trees are blue monkey females who are defending their respective territories so they're probably at the boundary of their home ranges right now and if you can look closely and see especially these females who are on the left they're forming a line where um or a phalanx where they're defending uh territory but you can probably see this better on the ground and i do so okay um every now and then so most of the time blue monkeys are way up in the trees but every now and then on this instance they came into the village where we live and they're forming a phalanx again so that's just a line um and you can see instances of that this is a cooperative activity you can see occasionally uh females looking behind them uh looking behind themselves to to check to see if their partners are there to to support them and so they're coordinating this effort and the group on the right is just kicking the group on the left but as they usually do there are tons of more females in that group you can hear the chirps and the growls which are popular noises doing an ige and these are all adult females i just want to be really clear most of the time the resident male doesn't get involved in this but you can see way in the back there this juvenile female juveniles are all juvenile females are also heavily involved and this kind of territorial dispute oh that was a trill there you go um so yeah some of the other friendly behavior so that was uh cooperative behavior in the context of competition but other really important friendly behavior is i already said that the the iges were my favorite but i actually think that this is my favorite uh and that's play so this occurs almost primarily among juveniles and in this species it happens more males do it more than females do interestingly that was a great shot of of a play face but i think that it works better in live action so uh why don't we show that okay i promise as i was doing this vocal follow i was much further away but they just kind of rough and tumbled until they were really close to me and i was stuck in the scrub so i just stayed very still and recorded this magnificent interaction you can see these big mouths that's a playface so that's friendly and overall you can tell it's not a fight because they're being slow they're not giving each other a full bite and it's repetitive and slow actions um and one interesting thing here so play in general is thought to be some kind of training or preparation for novel experiences and right now this is a quite a novel experience or a good training because these two animals are from different groups so these two boys um have cross boundary lines something that adult females would never do and uh and they're getting to know each other through play and just last comment uh that beeping that you heard at the end of that video um that is something that a lot of people who do primate field work will will hear in their sleep yeah because we wear we wear our watches and we're taking a point sample and that point sample is to say what is the our focal individual doing right now and that's one way that we get at um the duration of an event so say i was following dragon in that in that video i would say at that point sample dragon playing with sema and i would record it as long as they kept playing to to figure out how long he spends playing i hope that was that was clear yeah um so you also study chimpanzees how do chimpanzee social interactions compare to blue monkey social interactions so chimpanzees and blue monkeys um i mean you know they're they're similar in the sense that they're primates of course um and you know anthropoid primates uh but their social organizations are super different and it results in some pretty different behavior um so okay first similarities uh grooming is still super important but i gotta point out in this video it's not uh two females grooming each other these are two males um and that's what you see more commonly in chimpanzees um and that's partly because uh they live in multi-male multi-female groups unlike single male multi-female groups of blue monkeys males are living or staying in their natal groups so they end up uh forming the majority of cooperative ties and doing the most uh territorial defense whereas females don't um okay another similarity um they play so playing still happens playing happens in um i mean most animals honestly uh but differently uh males and females don't really have the same there's not as strong of a sex difference in play and chimpanzees as there is in blue monkeys which is an interesting thing um so again a difference is uh in blue monkeys females are making all those cooperative ties whereas female chimpanzees are usually solo i know that's a vast oversimplification they do a lot of really interesting things but it's not uncommon to see uh an adult female chimpanzee hanging out without any other adults and but with her dependent and companion offspring like you guys saw in that photo when we were planning this episode one of the things i really loved is your passion for things that are that are epic um what was your trajectory to getting where you are now that that makes me laugh because i must have said that word a bunch of times because i sometimes lack a better adjective um so i just love like big things i don't think i told you but you know like when i was a little kid my favorite movies were like alice in wonderland and fantasia and stuff so like um but i was really obsessed with dinosaurs so especially that like dinosaur vignette and fantasia oh yeah i mean what kid doesn't love dinosaurs but i was actually really dead set on being a paleontologist until i was maybe like 15 and then my love for the sciences kind of got mixed up with my love for the humanities and i thought that i would what i thought i wanted to do uh was become a writer and so i wanted to become a cultural anthropologist and travel the world and get some stories i ended up not loving uh explanations that were given for behavior and cultural anthropology and i got a whole lot more into uh evolutionary theory and biological explanations of behavior and kind of seeing just just having this sense of humans uh and me being on a continuum with with all other life so that was kind of that same like um deep time feeling uh that i loved so that's kind of how i ended up in this area of research and and i haven't left what were some of your first field experiences so my first first field work experience i was really lucky to be able to go to um field ecology school for a month and change in brazil in the coastal rainforest just outside of sao paulo while i was an undergrad um and that was really valuable because that was kind of the first time that i got out of the library and realized that like nature is chaotic and science doesn't come easy um but then my first experience with primates uh in the field was uh in sulawesi an island in indonesia where i worked for i was a research assistant for dr daphne carhawas studying black crested macaques and i completely fell head over heels in love with field work at that site um i loved running jumping climbing chasing monkeys poor monkeys through the forest yeah we're good to them um yeah and uh that so because i fell in love with field work i ended up continuing to pursue you know primatology and um my next experience i was able to do a master's at the university of roehampton where i worked at their field site in nigeria with all of baboons so yeah i i absolutely i don't understand why but i absolutely loved being able to watch an animal and then put like code its behavior into a digital format that gives me great satisfaction so that's what i was doing there um and you know probably like the greatest field experience that i've had was uh when i was controlling my own project and controlling the narrative and doing research uh on in kakamega forest in kenya on blue monkeys and that project was uh um was graciously funded by by the leaky organization so me being out there uh you know kind of happened without you guys and i don't know if you could notice but uh i wasn't just staring at monkeys on the ground there play monkeys uh are way higher so that requires some rubber necking one of your other passions is data analysis how does data analysis fit in with your lab and field work that's a great question so um i mean everyone has some amount of data analysis to do when you research whether it's just formatting your data or actually doing the statistical modeling um i i like i love actually i mean love hate doing both um so i i find uh data analysis to be one of the most rewarding parts of science uh because it's where you get to take raw data and find the patterns in it and i do all of my analyses in the programming language are which through a roller coaster relationship i've come to love very much uh so i could i could tell you more about it yeah you know um so i mean in addition to just being passionate about data analysis you're also passionate about teaching and mentoring data analysis and about our workshop could you tell us more about the our workshop and the importance of mentorship and data analysis absolutely so there are a couple of reasons i'm so enthusiastic about training people in data analysis so first for grad students i've often found that grad students are pretty siloed in their data analyses and they're mostly figuring how to do things for themselves by themselves and kind of reinventing the wheel so that was my experience and i desperately want to help other research trainees to not have that experience because yeah it's not necessary um but a second major reason uh that i'm that i'm passionate about teaching uh data analysis is because data literacy is power and this goes way beyond um way beyond anthropology or even or any science and academia um it's just a cultural thing so as a part of my fellowship i've had the opportunity to develop and implement this training course on introductory data analysis with r and that's aimed at non-science majors and focuses on data sets that relate to social justice issues like gun crime suicide and basically my goal is that with research skills people who experience problems can better uh able be able to solve them or be part of the solution themselves and engage with all these algorithms that run our lives we have shared a couple of links uh to information about your workshop and a blog you wrote about um using data to empower so definitely be sure to check those out if you're interested in learning more about her workshops i am very excited to dig deeper into your research and hear about more about the connections you found before we get started with nicole's talk though if you're enjoying this episode and are interested in seeing more be sure to subscribe to the leakey foundation's youtube channel and follow us on facebook or twitter to be sure to get reminders of the upcoming episodes now let's turn the virtual four over to nicole and hear more about her research okay thank you okay so let's get right into it um so as ariel and i were talking about uh the ability of soci sociality to shape fitness is really profound and it's widespread across social animals and it's become this link exploring this link has become a big area of research in the last few decades and in primatology uh this was primarily started with the work of joan silk gene altman robert sapolsky and susan alberts so got to give credit to them and i pretty much fell in love with exploring these ideas or the ideas surrounding this link when i was studying for a masters at roehampton university in 2010 and 2011. and there i worked with yulia layman and she introduced me and my cohort to social networks and their ability to influence fitness and physiology and this is also where i started to understand the distinction about social ties which i already said are those non-random preferential interactions with with group members and so fast forward a few years um and i've thought a lot about all the different ways or pathways that sociality or social ties lead to fitness and these are now evident in a number of social animals or social mammals though animals broadly probably the same um but each of these pathways are essentially based on a problem or a challenge that a given individual faces that a social tie can help solve um none of them are mutually exclusive actually several are probably working at once and i'm definitely not going to go through all of these i just wanted to highlight within the broader framework what i focus on and that's this pathway called reducing risk and allostatic load so allostatic load is basically it's a fancy name um it's a the outcome of a process called allostasis and really it's similar to several other ideas like stress dysregulation and really health in general so this is primarily a physiological pathway that highlights how social ties can help buffer or mitigate stressors in the environment so my research tends to inhabit this nexus looking at the relationship between social ties health physiology um and then when i can fitness like i said it's hard to get at actual fitness outcomes if if it's not long-term data so of course these causal arrows run both ways you got to take that into consideration nothing is simple um and the last aspect of this nexus that's important to me is acknowledging that this nexus is dynamic over the life course so like i said ties are only important or beneficial based on the challenges they help overcome and those challenges are different at different life stages so i usually for the sake of simplicity break these down uh break down life stages um into these three categories though there are arguably many more according to the species and that's infancy juvenility and adulthood where infancy is characterized by dependence on parental care for survival juvenile juveniles are no longer dependent on on parental care but they're still sexually immature and adults are fully mature and so as we've talked about already i've had the privilege of observing so many different primate species in the wild but i'm gonna talk to you guys uh focus on these two which which ariel introduced already and that's the blue monkey and eastern chimpanzees giving much credit and homage to the amazing teams that sustain these sites over the long term and also the people who i work with primarily on these projects and that was marina cords at the kakamega monkey project and melissa emory thompson director of the kabali chimpanzee project so i'll start off talking about this cercopithecoid primate the blue monkey that again lives in single male multi-female groups and the population i studied for my dissertation lives in this little pocket of western kenya and i'm going to start off with a basic question which was the whether or not social ties matter for fitness so this is the starting point if we don't have these type of correlational studies then examining the pathways that sociality influences fitness doesn't really make any sense so for this study we looked at survival in particular as a proxy for fitness of adult females and so using that long-term data we could find that uh adult females with strong and consistent social ties had the highest survival and on the flip side those that had strong but inconsistent ties had the lowest so you could actually get away fine uh with having weak ties they just needed to be inconsistent anyway there were more there's more detail there but basically uh what this indicated to us is that investment and social ties bears some kind of cost to females because it seems that without consistently strong partners the opportunity for any kind of reciprocity or stability is lost and interestingly uh that effect is cumulative so it becomes stronger the longer amount of time that your partners are unstable so then i wanted to examine some of the physiological and health-related pathways but i want to do that in juveniles now why juveniles in part because juveniles are understudied they get a bad rap they're so fun to watch though more importantly because their life stage presumably entails unique and strong challenges like physical growth and navigating a new social group so first i wanted to verify what exactly the major challenges or stressors are for juveniles and also whether social ties or sociality can buffer those stressors so what we found is that low energy balance is a major stressor for juveniles and we measured energy balance using a popular marker called urinary c-peptide of insulin and the stress response we measured with via fecal glucocorticoids so adding some sociality in there surprisingly aspects of social aspects of competition like maternal dominance status and experienced aggression were not stressors and then in terms of affiliative behavior interestingly playing did buffer the stress of low energy balance while grooming actually did the opposite so the more grooming a juvenile did actually increase the stress response beyond the effects of energy balance um so what that suggests is that female juveniles who are doing the brunt of that grooming are potentially paying integration costs to or sorry initiation costs to social integration because that grooming is in part to facilitate these development of long-term allies in their natal group so the last question last big question i had for blue monkeys uh was how social strategies or profiles uh develop and so we asked if do they perpetuate across generations looking at moms and infants and juveniles behavior and specifically what we wanted to find out is that are there maternal effects on sociality and what we found is that it's definitely not a one-to-one transmission but there's a definite suggestion that mother's social tendencies set up the next generation's tendencies so infants experiences with their mothers in their first year of life was a very strong predictor of their later social behavior as juveniles with group members and specifically with peers so other juveniles and that maternal effect was sex specific so male responses to maternal interactions were different from females all right so let's move on to chimpanzees uh for chimpanzees i have primarily been working on individuals in the adult stage of life and actually really focusing on late adulthood during the period of senescence or physiological decline and again uh these chimpanzees are from the kanewara community in the kabali national forest uganda so for our first question uh our first question basically has to do with uh examining physiological correlates um but ascertaining whether certain physiological processes are even relevant um to a given species so in chimpanzees we wanted to know if oxidative damage which is basically another type of stress or measure of allostatic load whether it increases with acute trauma like injuries and more importantly whether uh damage increases or accumulates with age and we found that there's no whole body accumulation with age we're using urinary markers to get at this but we do see that markers of inflammation and oxidative damage do increase in individuals preceding death so some indication there and then our social question so we've done these in separate studies to start off with our social question we want to know how does social integration change with the challenges of aging so again social ties solving problems subject to constraints senescence reduces physical activity or sorry it reduces physical function so we want to know how is sociality changing at the same time and so what we found here was that males and females they age differently in in the social world so males they decreased their social effort with age but they actually maintained high centrality so even though they put less effort into socializing they still were able to maintain really high integration maintaining connections with important and well integrated partners females on the other hand they also decreased in social effort but this resulted in overall greater seclusion with age and interestingly females appear to be replacing uh cooperative uh or affiliative ties with high rank so as they increase in in rank with age uh they're decreasing in sociality and so the million dollar question how does sociality shape physiological aging in chimpanzees um i'll have to leave you hanging because that's the next frontier and i think that's it thank you so much we actually we have a question um i feel like you'll be good to answer right now um which is please define centrality absolutely thank you for asking that question so that that term comes from social network analysis and so it's not talking about geogra like uh being central um in geographic space it's talking about um i wish i could just throw up a picture of a network but it's talking about how uh how central you are within the network of partners um so if you picture um i won't even go there so basically an individual increases in centrality when it either has many social partners or it has social partners that themselves have many social partners so basically it increases access to things like information um on on the flip side it could have a cost of uh increasing exposure to diseases um honestly a sociogram really helps and i'm sorry that i i didn't have that at hand to throw that up for you but i hope that that helps um well we will be taking questions from the audience very shortly if you have not gotten your question into the chat please be sure to do so now um but before we get to our audience questions nicole you have some future directions for some projects you're working on do you want to tell us a little bit more about those projects yeah uh thanks so my future directions have to do with looking at sociality more at a community level and evaluating the impacts on health from social and competitive exclusion and that's the umbrella theme for two pretty different projects so first i'm working with some researchers on unm's medical campus uh deborah mckenzie and johnny lewis and there we're looking at the effects of environmental metal pollutants on inflammation and immune dysregulation in pregnant navajo women this is a really important research question or an area to investigate because the navajo people are heavily exposed to environmental metals because the united states government disproportionately mined for heavy metals near native american reservations and then did little to nothing to clean up the mines when they closed them so it's been an ongoing problem for a couple generations now my other project which is quite different but in a way looks at a similar similar social phenomenon is evaluating whether competitive exclusion is driving the small and unhealthy population of blue monkeys uh not in kakamega but now at the ngogo site uh gogo forest in the kabali national forest uganda and for this project i'm collaborating with michelle brown at uc santa barbara who is the head director of the in gogo monkey project oh did i miss out on mallory's art no yeah let's go back and take a look at that amazing artwork yeah sorry um i got carried away and i didn't uh explain here so mallory kataki is a zuni pueblo uh artist who does i'm so glad we can zoom in she does this amazing this is the most amazing cycom in my opinion she's an artist and she wants to communicate the findings from the navajo uh the research on the navajo that we do to the navajo and this what you're seeing right now is a t cell and the receptors and um and reactions that are happening at its surface uh are represented by animals of strength and power um in navajo culture and she has been incredibly prolific especially during coven uh to communicate what what is the biological process of of infection and how your body body defends itself immunologically so i recommend you check out uh her art yeah we shared some links in the chat so definitely check it i've like seen some of her other works really quite lovely um but let's um let's now take some questions from the audience we have um our first question it comes from h could you speak a little about how the coven 19 pandemic has affected your research and the research of your colleagues so absolutely um i um have been incredibly lucky and i i don't uh i've never stopped acknowledging it but i've been incredibly privileged um to be able to work on this long-term data mining for questions that haven't been asked or answered yet so personally my research hasn't been severely affected i haven't been able to be in the lab doing some of these assays at some points i know that several people um haven't you know my colleagues haven't been able to come into the lab and it's limited at them and that way i mean and that's not even getting into uh my colleagues with with children so that's a whole new ball game again i i don't have kids so um it's it's easier for me but i i also really empathize um and commiserate with a lot of students who i know who have delayed their field work or had to really reshape their entire research plan so i give them full kudos for all of their creativity and their patience and um i i feel like i want to give them a hug to say don't stress you're it's going to be great this is what life does yeah it's um it's definitely uh uh it's it's kind of heartbreaking um yeah always yeah absolutely especially those who have lost people or are helping from the long-term effects so yeah i respect well let's um take an another question from the audience alice corning asks what is the biggest question you want to answer the biggest question that i want it's an epic question that is an epic question oh man i mean i wish that i could like put a biomonitor inside of an animal and just see how their body is responding to everything and gather tons and tons more data than i do um i think whatever my big question would be would uh would would have to do with um intergenerational transmission of of trauma um or you know programming of physiological functions especially related to the immune system so something like that okay let's take let's take another question from our audience um what does the uh sociality what effects does sociality have on conflict between and within groups that is such a good question that is the heart of uh so much socioecological theory that that has been being developed and refined for the last 30 plus 40 definitely 40 years [Music] in primatology and could you keep that question up because uh yeah let me just make sure i won't drone on too long about it but the answer is a ton um and actually i think that uh the way that it's commonly considered is that that conflict that you're highlighting is you know is an outcome of the competition that exists um for access to mates and resources that exists both within and between groups and that competition brings into play uh kind of a a landscape where different social strategies can be more or less beneficial um in accessing those resources or those or those mates um so you know based on the distribution of those resources you could have different outcomes in terms of what kinds of cooperative ties best serve you that that was really abstract but if if you're new to this i would recommend looking at work by andreas koenig who's really um well summarized uh well summarized the history of uh the thought behind uh modern socio-ecological models i could probably still use an update so thanks for the question and we have uh one last question from our audience uh what about intergenerational trauma epigenetics involved in that yeah um yeah intergenerational trauma i mean i'm i'm fascinated with that so trauma i mean it doesn't have to be trauma per se although trauma is interesting to study not only because uh that kind of research can actually help people but also because that's where you would potentially find a strong signal but basically intergenerational transmission of experience so it doesn't necessarily have to be negative or you know fitness reducing or health reducing experience and absolutely epigenetics are completely involved with that and for the last 10 years i've always i've regretted that like i've never developed dna analyses or you know any uh genetics in my toolkit so i wonder uh now that i'm an old dog if i could ever uh learn new tricks or if i can just collaborate with someone who really knows your stuff so that'd be great well my last question for you is do you have any advice for those watching who are interested in pursuing primate um behavior study as a career yeah okay yes i have i have a couple of a couple of tips um well first the first thing that occurs to me is that i know that some of these field experiences now it's becoming more popular that they are funded and paid assistantships that's wonderful and i encourage any graduate students who are already in the thick of it to include those assistant stipends and and their grant proposals um i think that that also looks favorably on you um but if if you're not able if you can't find a funded assistantship position you know on one of the many sites starting off just with you know you can you can go to zoos you can do research assistant positions at zoos which don't require travel and housing how do you find these positions well some of that it can be hard for for introverts out there believe it or not i am an introvert um and i think that well first off one thing that most people are concerned about that holds them back from reaching out is feeling like they're going to look dumb yeah that someone is going to make fun of them for asking a question that's ridiculous or you know is inappropriate and i say as hard as it is uh don't don't be afraid of looking done actually when that experience happens if anyone makes you feel dumb let that be a litmus test for that individual because that's not someone who's going to be your best mentor so you'll find your spot bring your enthusiasm bring bring your inquisitiveness and a good mentor is what you want and a good mentor will won't make you feel dumb well that was excellent advice nicole thank you so much for being here with us today we're we're done already that was yeah i know it flew by fine guys all right it was great to be with you well next week on lunch break signs we meet primatologists andrea baden and stacy ticot for a special earth day episode of lunch break science they'll be discussing lemur ecology and conservation so be sure not to miss that it's going to be a great episode and stay tuned after the episode for more information about leaky foundation programs thank you all for taking a break from your day and feeding your brain with the leaky foundation until next time stay hungry for knowledge stay hungry yeah bye bye break science is brought to you by the leakey foundation and made possible by the generous support of the annan gordon getty foundation and camilla and george smith visit us at leahyfoundation.org to learn more about the leaky foundation today's guest scientist and how you can help support human evolution research and educational programs like lunch break science right now all donations to the primary research fund will be matched by generous donors meaning your impact will be quadrupled miss an episode of lunch break science catch up on past episodes and browse our library of leaky foundation lectures on our youtube channel still hungry for signs and can't wait till our next episode check out the leaky foundation's award-winning podcast origin stories available wherever you listen to podcasts subscribe to the leakey foundation's youtube channel follow us on facebook and twitter or sign up for our newsletter to be the first to hear about exciting upcoming episodes and programs as well as groundbreaking discoveries in human evolution research

Channel: TheLeakeyFoundation

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Id: fT_G6aIs4MI

Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021