Jenny Tung

Biosketch

Jenny Tung, PhD is the Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), a Visiting Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University, and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Leipzig. She earned her BS and PhD from the Department of Biology at Duke University in Durham, NC. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Human Genetics and joined the Duke University Evolutionary Anthropology faculty in 2012. In 2022, she founded the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at MPI-EVA. She is a Kavli Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fellow, and was elected to the NAS in 2024.

Research Interests

Dr. Tung is interested in understanding how social behaviors, and the social environments they shape, influence gene regulation, population genetic variation, and ultimately health and fitness-related traits. This subject is fundamental to understanding human evolution because of the importance of social interactions in influencing survival and reproductive success—the currencies of evolutionary fitness. Dr. Tung’s work is grounded in evolutionary anthropology, but draws inspiration from evolutionary genetics, population genetics, and behavioral ecology. It also connects to outstanding questions about human health, where the pronounced effects of social adversity have highlighted the need for biological insight. Most of her work focuses on nonhuman primates and other social mammals, especially populations where it is possible to combine genetic or genomic analysis with data on the behavior, life history, and environmental milieu of known individuals. This combination is most clearly illustrated by her long-term research on the baboons of the Amboseli ecosystem, in Kenya, where she has co-directed the Amboseli Baboon Research Project since 2012.