Jenny Tung
Associate Professor
Dr. Jenny Tung is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University and a Faculty Associate of the Duke University Population Research Institute. Research in her lab uses genetic and genomic tools to shed light on behavioral and evolutionary questions. Dr. Tung's projects primarily focus on populations for which she can combine genetic analysis with data on the behavior, life history, and environmental milieu of known individuals. This approach enables the connection of behavioral and environmental effects on trait variation in individuals, to evolutionary outcomes on the level of populations and species. It also provides the opportunity to study the role of gene regulation in explaining social environmental effects on fertility, health, and survival across the life course, in mammalian models for human health.
Much of the research in her lab focuses on a population of baboons in the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya, which has been the subject of research by the Amboseli Baboon Research Project for almost 50 years. She also studies rhesus macaques in captivity and, through a collaboration with the Kalahari Meerkat Project, meerkats and Damaraland mole rats in South Africa.
Research Interests: social behaviour, gene regulation, genetic variation, evolutionary biology, social status, immune function