From Human Resources to Primates

Kayla Ahlness left a decade long career in human resources, to follow her dream to study primates in the African jungles.

Now as a graduate student at Florida Atlantic, her primate research paved the path to her top seat in the university's 2024 Three-Minute Thesis Competition, which requires competing students to explain their research, including both breadth and significance, to an audience containing both specialists and non-specialists. "It was challenging and exciting to fit my entire thesis into three minutes," she said. “It made me use a new part of my brain to articulate my research to a general audience."

Her winning presentation, titled “Why You Buggin' Out: Does Seasonality Drive Insectivory in a Mixed-Species Group of African Monkeys?" also earned the People's Choice Award at the 2024 Conference of Florida Graduate Schools.

Ahlness’ passion to study primates led her to a primate conservation class led by Kate Detwiler, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Anthropology in Florida Atlantic’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. "The more I worked with her on projects, the more I loved it, and the more she convinced me that I could be good at research," Ahlness said.

“I always knew I wanted to do something in conservation or working with animals," said Ahlness, who applied for the graduate program at Florida Atlantic where she continues her research as a first-semester student in the integrative biology doctoral program, Ahlness' thesis project is an extension of work initially started by a former lab member, focusing on the diet of a monkey population in Gombe National Park in Tanzania Africa. She and Detwiler analyze the data based on preliminary patterns. "The guenons we study are fascinating because they live in a mixed-species group, with hybrids seemingly thriving alongside them," Ahlness said.

Currently, Ahlness is immersed in the process of data transcription. This involves searching through research notebooks for dietary information, translating it from Swahili to English, and entering the data. "We have years' worth of data to go through," she said. "After transcription, I'll run analyses to find emerging patterns between diet and seasonality effects."

Despite being a beginner in research science, Ahlness said she hopes her work will one day make significant contributions to the field of primatology. Her thesis aims to provide valuable data on how diet may change in mixed-species populations and how seasonality and increased temperatures might affect diet. "I hope to contribute to conservation efforts and help spread accurate information to citizens, especially given the abundant tourism in Africa," she said.

Ahlness said she finds the growing use of AI and technology in research to be fascinating. "Many research teams are implementing artificial intelligence in their methods to help with identification, transcription, etcetera. This is huge for the industry because it can reduce time spent on tasks that can be automated, giving us more time to be in the field or the lab."