Primatologist, Biological Anthropologist
Professor, University of Southern California; Fellow, Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities
Amy is an interdisciplinary scholar who teaches at University of Southern California. She has studied the world’s captive population of bonobos for the last twenty-eight years. She found that the social system of the bonobo is unusual in many respects: females form real and meaningful bonds in the absence of kinship and females attack and dominate males. She was the first to characterize bonobo society as a matriarchy. She is currently interested in female mate choice decisions in humans. In all of her research, Amy uses an evolutionary, bio-cultural, feminist, and interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the origins of human behavior. Renowned anthropologist Sarah Hrdy and psychologist Frans de Waal jointly supervised her PhD work. In 2008, she received a Mellon Award for excellence in faculty mentoring of undergraduate students. Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine and she has appeared on Nova, National Geographic Explorer, NPR, and Discovery Health Channel productions. Amy gives numerous public lectures and keynote addresses in the Los Angeles area and around the world. She is a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.