General Information

NYCEP is a graduate training program in all aspects of the behavioral and evolutionary biology of primates, first funded by a National Science Foundation Research Training Grant in 1992 and recently renewed by the IGERT section through the year 2009. This unique program brings together a diverse faculty of 45 scientists from public and private universities and research/public education institutions in New York City.

Evolutionary primatology is a discipline that draws its theory, methods, and empirical data from many areas within the biological sciences, anthropology, and geology. NYCEP faculty research focuses on human as well as nonhuman primates from the perspectives of comparative morphology, paleontology and systematics, molecular and population genetics, behavior and ecology, and conservation biology. Students in this program take courses in all of these areas at the three universities, attend seminars that draw upon the staff of all five cooperating institutions, and have the opportunity to engage in original research in laboratories, museums, and in the field.

Each of the three universities cooperating in NYCEP has faculty strengths in two or more of the research areas mentioned above, but none covers all of these fields equally. Moreover, no university could hope to provide the paleontological and osteological collections and expertise of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) nor the living collections and field research expertise of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), with its facilities such as the Bronx Zoo. By combining the sources of expertise of its member institutions, NYCEP can offer a diversity of training opportunities unrivaled anywhere in the United States.

New York is a city of great opportunities but also of high costs. The goal of NYCEP is to facilitate the training of its graduate students while offering them access to all that New York has to offer. Students formally enroll in one of the three universities but participate in an integrated and overarching training program that unites students and faculty of all five institutions. Student choice of university affiliation should thus be based upon faculty expertise and facilities rather than financial or other non-substantive reasons. In order to increase the proportion of groups underrepresented in science, minority students and women are especially encouraged to apply to NYCEP, and special funding support may be available to them.