Dr. Rebecca Stumpf

Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rebecca Stumpf grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, the middle child of a large family, which also included many dogs, cats, horses, and various other animals of all shapes and sizes. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1990, she moved back east to pursue the field of animal behavior. After a two year stint working on a whale research boat in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, she decided that while whales were very intriguing, they were difficult subjects for extended behavioral observations. Thus, she concluded that primates would be more promising subjects for behavioral research. During her PhD work in anthropological sciences at Stony Brook University, Rebecca studied sexual dimorphism in the white-collared brown lemur in Madagascar, morphological variation in gorilla crania, and then completed her dissertation work on the reproductive strategies of female chimpanzees in the Tai Forest of the Ivory Coast. When she is not busy trying to convince her students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that biological anthropology is a truly fascinating field, she is helping to analyze the reproductive and stress hormones of Bornean orangutan samples at Harvard University.