As an avid watcher of all the series of PBS nature shows, I had always assumed I would be a field researcher. After attending the Tamarin Social Ecology SFS course in Panama, I quickly learned that nature shows carefully edit out years or decades of hard work to just show a very brief outline of what field work truly entails. At the time, I was also not as fond of being dirty all the time. I really, truly enjoyed my SFS course, but worried whether I was really cut out for this career.

Rather than follow my passion for animals, I took the “safe” route and got a BS in chemical engineering and a PhD in bioengineering and have worked in various areas of product development from formulating sunscreens to designing biotechnology education kits to formulating assays for medical diagnostics. I left my watching of animals for hiking and kayaking trips and various vacations around the world. I mostly have managed to plan my vacations around climbing and critters where I do some rock or ice climbing and also go look for local animals. And oddly enough, I probably spend more time dirty and hungry now than I ever did when I was in Panama.

I never lost my love of field research and have volunteered where I could, including helping a kayaking friend perform census work for orcas, helping a hiking friend perform droppings analyses for mountain lions, helping with local sea otter census work, attending an Earthwatch trip to study cicada nesting preferences, and more recently attending a Biosphere Expeditions trip as a citizen scientist helping collect data on snow leopard prey distribution and setting camera traps in Kyrgyzstan. As I transition out of the corporate world and into more flexible time, I hope to continue participating in volunteer programs to contribute to knowledge of wildlife.

Favorite SFS Memory: One of my SFS memories was the visit of a leading tamarin researcher to our site. We were excited for his visit to give him some grief because he had misassigned the gender of one of the local tamarins in a group we were studying. However, on the day he arrived, we had run very low on food and were attempting to make something edible out of the remaining food we could find on our scantly filled shelves – names Cheez Whiz, lentils and tripe.

The visiting scientist had brought Oreo cookies so at that point, we no longer had any interest in his abilities to assign tamarin gender but were fully thrilled to consume a dinner of Oreos and the very strong cowboy coffee we drank by the gallon. Fortunately, a local fisherman came by our camp the next day so we dined on freshly caught fish, mangoes from nearby trees, and another serving of Oreo cookies. And after we successfully trapped another tamarin, learned that determining tamarin gender was not necessarily as simple a task as one would assume.