Our Team
Eduardo Fernández-Duque
Science Director
Eduardo is the fundator and science director of the Owl Monkey Project. He is a biological anthropologist with a general interest in understanding the evolution and maintenance of social systems. He was born in Argentina , and after completing his Ph.D. in Animal Behavior at the University of California in Davis, he spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the Zoological Society of San Diego. His main research interest is to examine the mechanisms that maintain social monogamy and the role that sexual selection may have had in the evolution of this unusual mating system. With a main focus in pair-living primates, he has studied sakis, titis, and owl monkeys in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Argentinean Chaco, as an approach to understanding the evolution of human behavior. He is particularly interested in male-female relationships, pair bonding and paternal care in humans and non-human primates, and his extended work includes more than 100 publications! In July 2014 he joined the Department of Anthropology at Yale University.
To know more about the amazing work of our director visit: https://fernandezduque.wordpress.com
Dr. Alba Garcia de la Chica
Ph.D. University of Barcelona
Alba received her B.S. in Psychology from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2012, followed by an M.Sc. in Primatology and a Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona. Her passion for primate behavior led her to Formosa, Argentina, where she joined the Owl Monkey Project for her doctoral research. There, she investigated the role of intrasexual competition among pair-bonded individuals and solitary floaters in shaping the species’ social organization and mating system. After ten years of involvement, she is now the co-director of the project, alongside Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque.
Currently, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Buenos Aires, Alba is expanding her research to explore mate choice mechanisms in owl monkeys. Her broader research interests include male-female relationships, the roles of sexual selection and competition in the evolution of mating systems, and how social factors influence life history evolution and reproductive strategies across social systems. Alba is also committed to advancing her analytical skills in Bayesian statistics, evidence synthesis, and causal inference, further broadening her methodological expertise.
Marcelo Rotundo
Project Manager, Proyecto Mirikiná
Secretary, Fundación ECO
Marcelo was working at the Argentinean Primate Center in Resistencia when he first came to Formosa to visit the site of the still-non-existent Owl Monkey Project. He spent the weekend camping with Eduardo´s family in the forest and together they walked along the Pilagá River to decide where they should study the monkeys. In 1999, Marcelo joined the project full-time and has been working here since then.
His role has been instrumental in the success and longevity of the Owl Monkey Project. Nobody knows the monkeys of Guaycolec better than him. He has been responsible for the capturing of over 140 owl monkeys. His field skills have also sent him on numerous trips to another field site, the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he collaborated in the capturing of owl, saki, titi, and squirrel monkeys.
Jonathan Pertile
Jonathan Pertile is an evolutionary anthropologist with a broad interest in behavioral ecology. As a member of the Owl Monkey Project, he researches the social evolution of the Azara’s owl monkey in Argentina. He previously studied evolutionary anthropology and biology at Duke University, where he worked in Dr. Christine Drea’s lab and at the Duke Lemur Center, researching the energetics and endocrinology of pregnancy in lemur genera with different life-history paces.
David Wood
David studied Anthropology and Psychology at University of Illinois where he worked in Dr. Rebecca Stumpf’s behavioral endocrinology lab creating a developmental trajectory of urinary cortisol in pre-dispersed female chimpanzees. After graduating, he worked for a year at the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in Guanacaste, Costa Rica run by Dr. Susan Perry (UCLA) collecting field data on white-faced capuchin behavior and social interactions. Currently, David is a PhD student at Yale University developing research into parental care behaviors of owl monkeys and titi monkeys.
Facundo Fernandez-Duque
Facundo grew up in Formosa and spent a great deal of time playing at the Guaycolec field site as a child. From his experiences there, he developed a passion for biology that drove him to do his first research study with the Owl Monkey Project. Afterward, he went on to study Biological Sciences at Cornell University and became closely involved with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the wonderful mentors there, he participated in numerous research projects spanning a wide array of topics. Looking to narrow down his research interests after graduation, he joined various behavioral ecology studies in Ecuador. Upon returning to the United States, he has been working as a research assistant for the Owl Monkey Project and Dr. A. Caccone’s Genetics Lab at Yale while he applies for graduate school.
