Biographic Info
Marina Cords received
her B.S. in
Biology with honors, magna cum laude, from Yale University in 1978, and her Ph.D. in Zoology from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1984. She held a Fogarty
International Fellowship at the University of Zürich (Department
of Ethology and Wildlife Research) in 1985, and returned to the
University of Zürich
in 1988-1991 with
an H.F. Guggenheim Career Development Award. In 1986
and 1987, she held appointments as research scientist at the University
of California Primate Center (Davis), and as lecturer at UC Berkeley
(Department of Zoology) and Rutgers University (Department of Zoology
and Physiology). Since 1991 she has been on the faculty at
Columbia University, where she is now professor in the Department of
Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology (E3B) and also in the
Department of Anthropology. Together with colleagues at CUNY and
NYU, as well as the American Museum of Natural History and the Wildlife
Conservation Society, she oversees the New York Consortium in
Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP),
a consortial doctoral
program, long supported by NSF, that links behavioral, ecological, conservation, genetic, and
morphological research on primates.
Marina’s major research
interests
focus around the social behavior, socioecology, life history and mating systems of
animals which, like non-human primates, have long lives and good
memories – thus those with the potential for forming long-term
social ties. She began her doctoral studies in the
Kakamega Forest, western Kenya, on two guenon species, and has been
conducting fieldwork there ever since. As a post-doc, however,
she also spent four years conducting behavioral experiments on social
conventions and conflict management of captive macaques, and she deeply
appreciates both field and laboratory investigation. Currently,
her work focuses on wild arboreal blue monkeys, Cercopithecus
mitis stuhlmanni, which represent a little known but species-rich branch of the Old World primate family tree. Together
with students, her work has also addressed topics related to rain
forest ecology and conservation, and has included physiological and
genetic investigations that inform an understanding of behavior.
Marina has published many scientific
papers and several popular articles, has written one monograph
(Mixed-species association of Cercopithecus monkeys in the Kakamega
Forest, Kenya. (1986.) Univ.
Calif. Pub. Zool.) and co-edited a
prize-winning book (with Mary Glenn; 2002, The Guenons: Diversity and
Adaptation in African Monkeys). Her research has been
supported
by various funding organizations, including the National Science
Foundation, Leakey, Wenner-Gren, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Marina
is a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She
serves and has
served on various editorial
boards, NSF review panels, and in multiple capacities within Columbia
University, most related to the teaching of science to undergraduates.
She was the inaugural chair of Columbia's Department of Ecology,
Evolution and Environmental Biology from
2001-2005. She is a regular reviewer for numerous journals and funding
agencies, and was elected VP for Research for the International
Primatological Society in 2018. She has also volunteered to teach
about tropical
forests in New York City public schools. However, her most
satisfying service relates to conservation education activities near
the Kakamega Forest, Kenya, her field site. There she has worked
together with local people to construct three conservation education
resource centers and to implement a conservation education program for
children
and young people.
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