Im absolutely thrilled to be one of the 10 researchers awarded a Ben Barres Spotlight award from the Journal eLife this year. The funding from this award will enable us to purchase laptops and set up a dedicated computer lab at the Fossey Fund's new campus in Rwanda. The long-term data on gorillas that I work with is collected by a huge number of local researchers, many of whom lack the coding or statistical skills to analyse this huge volume of data themselves. Our hope is that through running tutorials in coding and cutting-edge methods for the analysis of this data we will enable these researchers to conduct their own data analysis and lead their own research projects, resulting in even more rwandan-led research.

Thanks so much to Eric DePalma and Dr. Raffaella Commitante at the Southern California Primate Research Forum for inviting me to speak at the APES forum this month. You can catch the full session here on YouTube

Thrilled that our recent paper on inter-group gorilla relationships made the Altmetric Top 100 — #58 out of 3.4m papers! Its a real honor to study a species that people across the globe are so captivated by and an incredible opportunity to engage people in scientific discussion about conservation, evolution and animal behaviour.

I was incredibly honored to be awarded the Napier Memorial Medal by the Primate Society of Great Britain at their virtual winter meeting this week and for the opportunity to talk about gorilla social behaviour and what it can tell us about the evolution of our own complex society. A huge thank you to the committee for organising such a friendly and interesting conference and managing to cultivate such a strong sense of community despite not being able to meet in-person.