MidCareer Faculty Research Award

Associate Professor | Anthropology | Michelle Brown

Eavesdropping on the neighbors: passive acoustic monitoring of competitive pressures on wild primates: Wild animals compete for food and this daily struggle affects their behavior, survival, and evolutionary trajectories. Yet for our non-human primate relatives, almost nothing is known about the causes and consequences of feeding competition against other species, in spite of being widespread and dynamic. I propose to leverage recent advances in artificial intelligence to assess the acoustic landscape for red-tailed monkeys in Uganda using audio recordings, because rainforest animals signal their presence with loud, frequent vocalizations. The competitive landscape is the missing puzzle piece that aligns food availability, animal behavior, and patterns of energy gain. As a result, this work will establish an entirely new approach to the testing of competition-based hypotheses in biological anthropology and behavioral ecology. I will publish the results in two peer-reviewed journal articles, and use them to write a senior grant proposal to NSF.

Associate Professor | Psychology | Nicola Grissom

Dissociating the contributions of chromosomal and gonadal sex mechanisms on explore-exploit tradeoffs in decision making: Essentially every neuropsychiatric diagnosis shows evidence of sex and/or gender biases. Executive functions, especially decision making, are implicated in these conditions. There is strong evidence of sex differences in decision-making in humans and animal models. In particular, an aspect of decision making called the explore-exploit tradeoff shows sex differences, and suggests that sex drives individuals to have different preferences for exploratory choices or repeated choices. However, sex is not a single variable, but an amalgamation of multiple biological mechanisms, including sex chromosomes and gonadal hormones. Using a mouse model which allows separating sex chromosome influences from gonadal influences, my lab will determine which of these factors most strongly drives sex differences in the explore exploit tradeoff. These findings will support a greater understanding of the complexity of sex as a suite of mechanisms that exert unique combinations of impacts to produce neurodiversity.

Associate Professor | Sociology | Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

How Demography Constrains and Enables Ideational Persistence and Change: I propose to develop rigorous models of experience and historical memory as they are carried through family ties, and use them to develop novel hypotheses about how demography has constrained and enabled political and cultural change. I will develop these ideas initially in the context of the Black freedom struggles in the United States, although the models are more general. This project will develop a framework that describes individuals’ closest genealogical ties to foundational moments, and that analyzes how the population’s distribution of those ties changes as individuals are born, die, and migrate—offering a distinctive portrait of a population’s distance from historical events at a given moment in chronological time. These tools can aid a new research program to understand how demography enables or constrains political possibilities by creating a demographic context that creates greater or lesser possibility for historical events to be made salient by political actors.