Margaret A. Stanton

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of New England in Biddeford, ME.  I am broadly interested in the adaptive value of social behavior and the evolution of social complexity, with a focus on the influence of early social experiences on individual outcomes in wild populations.  I take a broad comparative approach and through collaborations with the Gombe Chimpanzee Project and the Shark Bay Dolphin Project I primarily conduct research in two long-lived mammalian species: chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins.  With long-term datasets that now span multiple generations organized into online relational databases, we can make use of data mining and statistical techniques, such as network analysis, to investigate behavior across the long lifespan of individuals and relate early experience to adult outcomes in both systems.