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Center for the Study of Human Origins

Department of
Anthropology
 
New York University

25 Waverly Place
New York City
NY 10003

telephone:
212.992.9785
fax:
212.995.4907

Christopher Schmitt

Juvenile female woolly monkey with mother; infant woolly monkey, taking independence one step at a time; adolescent spider monkey wondering why I’m pointing that huge lens at him. Summer 2007.

Position: Ph.D. Candidate. New York University and NYCEP. Physical Anthropology
Education: M.A. 2006. New York Univeristy. Physical Anthropology
B.S. 2003. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Zoology and English Literature

E-mail: cas486@nyu.edu

Phone: (212) 998-3814

Me with a sleeping capuchin and an unfortunate mohawk, Costa Rica, 2004

Research Sites: My current research takes place at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station (TBS), near Yasuni National Park, Ecuador.  I’ve also worked as an assistant on the Proyecto de Monos in the Reserva Biologica Lomas Barbudal, Guanacaste, Costa Rica; and at Estacion Biologica Corrientes, Corrientes, Argentina.

Research Focus:

My dissertation research takes a comparative approach to understand the implications of social organization on juvenile behavioral development and adaptations to ecological risks in white-bellied spider monkeys (Ateles belzebuth) and lowland woolly monkeys (Lagothrix poeppigii) in Amazonian Ecuador.  I’ll be conducting my research at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station from November 2007 until January 2009.  While in New York, I’m also looking for morphological correlates of locomotor behavior and life history in the bony shoulder complex in the Atelinae at the American Museum of Natural History, and conducting a genetic analysis of the population structure of Lagothrix poeppigii in the Molecular Anthropology Lab at NYU.

Watching woollies in the varzea, summer '07.

My interests involve life history and socioecology in New World primates, particularly with regards to the juvenile phase.  More specifically, I’m interested in primate juvenile and adolescent social and physiological development, dispersal and the strategies of dispersing individuals, mating systems and parental care, affiliative behaviors and behavioral traditions (handsniffing in Cebus is a particular favorite), population genetics, and GIS.

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