Anthony Di Fiore
The University of Texas at Austin
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Primary Section: 51, Anthropology Secondary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Anthony Di Fiore is a behavioral ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist recognized for his work on primates of the Americas. Di Fiore was born in West Point, NY, and grew up in northern Virginia. He received his undergraduate degree in 1990 from Cornell University, where he studied biology (ecology and evolution), and his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California at Davis, where he studied biological anthropology and tropical ecology. After spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular genetics at the Department of Zoological Research at the Smithsonian Institution-National Zoological Park and in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, he joined the faculty of New York University in 2000. Since 2011, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Primate Molecular Ecology and Evolution Laboratory. He has served on the executive committee of the American Association of Physical (now Biological) Anthropologists and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
The main focus of Anthony Di Fiore's research program is on understanding the diversity of wild primate social systems and the factors influencing primate community structure and coexistence. To this end, Di Fiore directs long-term behavioral and ecological field research on multiple taxa in the primate community of Amazonian Ecuador, investigating the ways in which environmental conditions and the strategies of conspecifics together shape individual behavior and social relationships and, ultimately, determine the kinds of societies we see primates living in. His research program complements these field studies with genetic and genomic labwork to study aspects of animal social systems and ecology that are typically difficult to explore through observational studies alone, including questions about dispersal behavior, gene flow, mating patterns, population structure, and the fitness consequences of individual behavior. Additionally, in collaboration with colleagues from across South and Central America, Di Fiore also uses genetic and genomic data to investigate broader questions concerning the evolutionary history and phylogeography of various South American primates. Beyond his field- and laboratory-based research, Di Fiore also is interested comparative phylogenetic studies, statistical programming, agent-based simulation modeling, and physical computing.
