Grantee Spotlight
Sharifah Namaganda is a Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellow from Uganda. She is a PhD candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan who studies how chimpanzees move in the trees. Her research interests are primate behavior and ecology, locomotion, cognitive evolution, and conservation.
Before coming to the University of Michigan, Sharifah earned a master’s degree at Makerere University in Uganda. She also worked as a research assistant with the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, a long-running field study of chimpanzee communities in Uganda’s Kibale National Forest. After earning her PhD, she hopes to work with faculty from Makerere University’s Zoology Department to develop primatology classes and provide undergraduate and graduate student research mentorship to interested students.
She hopes to inspire more Ugandans to study primates, and to build a network of people interested in primate biology and conservation.
Questions and answers with Sharifah Namaganda
What is the focus of your Leakey Foundation-supported work?
This fellowship will support my dissertation project in which I will examine different facets of great ape positional behavior, including their choice of routes through the tress. Part of my work focuses on understanding how various support characteristics, such as different sizes or types of tree branches and other support structures influence chimpanzee locomotion. I will also investigate how support structures and behavioral contexts influence chimpanzee locomotion and posture across age-sex categories of chimpanzees.
How did you feel when you learned about your Baldwin Fellowship?
I was ecstatic! The fellowship will support the fieldwork portion of my dissertation in Ngogo, Kibale National Park, which will be on understanding arboreal route navigation in non-human great apes. I am particularly interested in arboreal route navigation and selection because of the intrinsic qualities of the forest canopy, including the small, random, compliant and discontinuous supports, which make it a difficult environment to live and move around in.
What has surprised or challenged you in the work you’re doing?
Though there are many hurdles in the work I do, something I find quite challenging is knowing that the survival of my study subjects is highly dependent on humans, many of whom might care less about their conservation. For starters, a variety of human-driven activities pose a serious threat to primate habitats and populations.
Ideally, I would like some of my work to translate into practical conservation knowledge that can have positive impact on the protection of primates and their habitats, but this is a very difficult goal to achieve given the social and political dimensions of conservation in primate range countries.
What are you working on next?
To provide a comparative context for responding to the various research questions I wish to address, it is crucial for me to study different chimpanzees living in diverse environments that pose unique challenges. Therefore, this summer, I will observe savannah chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal.
The savannah environment presents different ecological challenges. For instance, because it is hotter and drier, it might not have as many fruiting trees as the lush forests of East Africa, like Ngogo. I am interested in determining whether there are any particular factors that make locomotion more challenging at the different phases of life. I also want to learn whether chimpanzees of different age groups employ different strategies to overcome these challenges.
