CONWAY, Ark. (September 3, 2013) – Dr. Graham L. Banes will present “"In the Realm of the Red Ape: Among the Orang-utans of Tanjung Puting National Park" on Monday, Sept. 16, at 7 p.m. in Mills Social Sciences Center Lecture Hall C.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be tailored for a general, diverse audience.
Dr. Banes completed his doctorate in biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge in England, where he performed genetic analyses of social structure, mate choice and reproductive success among the endangered wild orang-utans of Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesia. He is currently a postdoctoral scientist in both the Departments of Primatology and Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He is also a postdoctoral scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Max Planck Society Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai, People's Republic of China, an adjunct professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a research associate at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison. Banes developed and authored The Kingfisher Encyclopedia of Life, a book “designed to provide readers with an imaginative introduction to the natural world and to the huge array of species that inhabit it. The information is organized according to the average life span or life cycle of each species.”
Banes’ visit to Hendrix is in connection with his research collaboration with Dr. Tom Goodwin, the Elbert L. Fausett Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Hendrix. In the initial stages of this project, Goodwin and his students will analyze cheek pad swabs from male orang-utans at the Center for Great Apes in Florida in a search for compounds that may contribute to intraspecies chemical signaling.
The Hendrix Biological Society; the Hendrix Student Affiliates Section of the American Chemical Society, the Hendrix Biochemistry/Molecular Biology (BCMB) club, Hendrix Psi Chi, and the Hendrix Sociology/Anthropology Club are co-sponsors of this event.
For more information, contact Dr. Tom Goodwin at 450-1252 or goodwin@hendrix.edu.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country’s “Up and Coming” liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country’s best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.