All NYCEP students have the opportunity to study the natural history collections of the American Museum of Natural History and consult with core and resource faculty based at the AMNH. Select students in the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the AMNH (the first museum-based Ph.D. program in the USA) participate in the NYCEP program. With fundamental courses in evolution, ethics and communication, systematics and biogeography, as well as immersive elective courses in genomics, conservation biology, earth sciences, organismal biology and paleontology, the RGGS program expands museum- and field-based research in areas that complement the rest of NYCEP.
Core NYCEP faculty at the City University of New York are based in the Physical Anthropology section of the doctoral program in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, with a strong emphasis on evolutionary approaches to understanding human and nonhuman primate biology. All doctoral students in Physical Anthropology at CUNY participate in NYCEP. CUNY faculty advise students and conduct research in paleoanthropology, paleoprimatology, human and primate population genetics, primate behavior and nutritional ecology, hominin behavior and paleoecology, comparative and functional morphology, bioarchaeology, systematics, geometric morphometrics, forensic and skeletal biology, and conservation biology.
Core NYCEP faculty at Columbia University are based in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology (E3B), which emphasizes a multi-disciplinary perspective on the earth's declining biodiversity, integrating understanding from relevant fields in biology with insights from relevant fields in the social sciences. Doctoral students in the E3B Evolutionary Primatology track participate in the NYCEP program. Core faculty advise students and conduct research in primate behavior and ecology, primate population genetics, and conservation biology.
Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM), one of the foremost medical schools and medical centers in the world, is home to many leading laboratories and state-of-the-art facilities in anatomical, neuroanatomical, morphological, radiological, osteological, and genomic sciences. NYCEP students often have opportunities to take courses at the medical school and subsequently to serve as teaching assistants. NYCEP students who have been based in laboratories at MSSM or have taught there have gone on to distinguished careers in anatomy, physical anthropology and biomedical sciences and education. NYCEP faculty and students are based in the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology and the Department of Orthopaedics.
Core NYCEP faculty at NYU are based in the Biological Anthropology section of the doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology, with an emphasis on research broadly related to the study of human evolution, molecular primatology and primate behavior. All doctoral students in Biological Anthropology at NYU participate in NYCEP. Core faculty members advise students and conduct research in primate and human paleontology, evolutionary morphology, paleoecology, dental anthropology, molecular systematics, genetics, phylogeography, and primate behavior and life-history.
WCS maintains over three hundred living primates at the Bronx Zoo, the Central Park Zoo and St. Catherine's Survival Center. The collections are taxonomically diverse and include over 30 species and subspecies of primates, with examples of lemurids, lorisids, callitrichines, cebines, atelines, pitheciines, cercopithecines, colobines and hominoids. In conjunction with its policy of developing more naturalistic settings for the primates, the zoo has, in recent years, successfully established breeding groups or pairs of lemurs, lion-tailed macaques, Japanese macaques, gelada baboons, proboscis monkeys, slow lorises and gibbons. Under the auspices of WCS, NYCEP graduate students are able to conduct various types of non-intrusive behavioral research on a wide variety of free-ranging primates at the zoological parks managed by the WCS as well as participate in conservation research projects at international WCS sites.