Raisa Hernandez Pacheco
California State University-Long Beach, CA·Ecology & Evolution
In social mammals, including humans, an individual's place in the group can shape its life. Socially advantaged individuals often get more resources, better health, more offspring and longer lives.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
evolutionary demography
life history evolution
eco-evolutionary dynamics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Characterize physical and cognitive traits across the lifespan in rhesus macaques at Cayo Santiago and test whether these traits vary with individuals' social status.
- Build a demographic model of survival and reproduction that uses observed links between individual traits and social status to quantify performance across the population's social structure.
- Test whether social standing creates selection on life history traits, using joint perturbation analyses of the parameterized demographic model across levels of social stratification.
More about the research
It is still unclear whether these individual effects add up to change how whole populations grow and evolve. The gap is largest for long-lived, socially complex animals with flexible thinking abilities, such as primates.
Why it matters
This work adds basic understanding of how social status in a long-lived primate shapes survival, reproduction and natural selection at the population level. It could eventually inform how scientists think about social effects on health and lifespan in social mammals, including humans, and trains diverse students in quantitative biology.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Edmund Brodie
University of Virginia, VA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether age-dependent behavior in forked fungus beetles comes from an individual's own development or from flexible responses to partners of different ages, using paired interactions between beetles of different ages.
Mark Haussmann
Bucknell University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the molecular, cellular and whole-body performance traits that explain why some Leach's storm-petrels show the expected trade-off between reproducing and surviving while others escape it, guided by a 70-year population record.
Jacinta Beehner
University of Michigan, MI·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether female non-human primates use aggression and dominance to monopolize males and gain social benefits such as protection and infant care, using long-term behavioral and demographic databases.
The school
California State University-Long Beach: 3 labs on PI Pages, $34M a year on research, 24 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.