| | | Name: | Dr. Jeanne Altmann | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Jeanne Altmann is currently Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Emerita at Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1979 and went on to work for the Chicago Zoological Society, the Brookfield Zoo, and the University of Chicago. She moved to Princeton in 1998.
Jeanne Altmann is one of the generation of pioneering female primatologists and since 1971 has carried out long-term field research on baboons in Amboseli National Park, Kenya (together with her now deceased husband Stuart Altmann). She came to primatology from mathematics and her 1974 paper “Observational Study of Behaviour Sampling Methods” revolutionized field primatology with a solid mathematical analytical methodology, the importance of which was clearly demonstrated in her now classic 1980 book, Baboon Mothers and Infants. Throughout her long career (and over 160 publications) her research has dealt with life history approaches to behavioral ecology, emphasizing an integrated approach involving studies of behavior, ecology, demography, genetics, and physiology at the level of individuals, social groups, and populations. Most recently she and her collaborators have been focused on studies that relate endocrine and genetic data to demographic and behavioral information for the same individuals in the Amboseli baboon population.
Jeanne Altmann has won the Exemplar Award of the Animal Behavior Society in 1996, the Distinguished Primatologist Award of the American Society of Primatologists in 2006, the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award of the Animal Behavior Society in 2012, the Sewell Wright Award of the American Society of Naturalists in 2013, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Primatological Society in 2014. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society (president, 1985-86), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996), and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). Jeanne Altmann was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
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