Shirley Strum

Shirley C. Strum is a professor of anthropology at UC San Diego and director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Kenya. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Strum currently divides her time between Kenya and San Diego. The Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project is one of the five longest running research projects on wild primates, now in its 40th year. The Kenya team consists of Kenyan para-ecologists and para-behaviorists and international graduate students and interns. UNBP’s motto is “Science to understand ‘our’ origins; Conservation to guarantee ‘our’ future.” Dr. Strum was one of the first to uncover social complexity in wild primates, an important impetus for reconsidering the issue of primate mind in the late 1970’s. Current projects have two tracks. The first set of studies explores how socio-ecological complexity influences individual behaviors and how group level phenomena emerge from individual action (troop movement, troop fission, troop fusion, addition of new food items to the diet). These baboon data offer a critique of assumptions about evolutionary arguments and reset the starting point for human evolution. The second track focuses on conservation using the best possible science to understand the dynamics of modern biodiversity problems as well as to create innovative solutions (crop raiding, translocation, community based conservation, ecotourism). She recently was the international expert called upon to evaluate and recommend solutions to the human-baboon conflict in Cape Province, South Africa.Dr. Strum has also been active in public education through a large number of award winning nature documentaries.