The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide support for a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Matthew Cooper to work with Dr. Mewa Singh at the University of Mysore in India. Support for this project is provided by the U.S.-India Program.
Dr. Cooper will study the effect of intergroup competition on relationship quality in bonnet macaques. Species with high levels of intergroup competition are expected to have valuable relationships with group members. The project will examine the association between intergroup encounters and relationship quality, and its ability to account for variation in an array of aggressive and affiliative behavior. During this study, he will provide field data to a comparative database on conflict resolution on this genus, he will quantify the level of encounters so that interspecific comparisons can be made, and finally to determine the flexibility of social relationships within a species in the face of variation in intergroup encounters. Dr. Singh is currently working on a comparative study of the primates of South India. He maintains a research site at the Indira Gandhi Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu, India. He has located 32 bonnet groups on this reserve. In addition to working with Dr. Singh and his group, Dr. Cooper will collaborate with Dr. Filippo Aureli, one of the few scientists with experience studying reconciliation in a forest group of monkeys in the wild. He is affiliated with the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta, GA, and will be at the University of Liverpool's Department of Biological Anthropology. ***
