Liz Hall is a PhD candidate interested in the emergence and transmission of zoonotic pathogens between humans and nonhuman primates in West and Central Africa. She recently returned to the states after completing 16 months of dissertation fieldwork in Dzanga Sangha Protected Areas in Central African Republic from April 2017 to July 2018. Her dissertation combines methods in ethnography, human biology, and epidemiology to better understand how zoonotic infectious disease risk is distributed across gender and subsistence pattern at the human-wildlife interface. Liz completed her MS in Anthropology at Purdue University studying chimpanzee behavior and health in a fragmented and heavily human-impacted forest in Korup National Park, Cameroon.
Before beginning her graduate education, Liz completed her bachelor’s degree at Duke University in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. Afterward, she gained valuable experience as a research assistant at Santa Rosa National Park in Guanacaste, Costa Rica where she collected behavioral and hormonal data on capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus). She later worked with Wildlife Conservation Society in Republic of Congo to non-invasively collect and track observational health data on wild lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). She hopes to continue interdisciplinary research that combines wildlife ecology, disease ecology, epidemiology, and biological and cultural anthropology to explore factors that predict and influence health outcomes in human and wildlife populations.
Dr. Melissa J. Remis 