Agustín Fuentes is an American primatologist and biological anthropologist at Princeton University and formerly the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His work focuses largely on human and non-human primate interaction, pathogen transfer, communication, cooperation, and human social evolution.

Education and career

Fuentes was born on July 30, 1966 in Santa Barbara, California and graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology and Zoology, as well as an M.A. and PhD in Anthropology. He has since been researching fields of biological anthropology and primatology, exploring the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural dimensions. He began his academic career at Central Washington University and most recently served at the University of Notre Dame in a number of different roles, including Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. Beginning in fall 2020, he has served as professor in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Fuentes was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Work

One of Fuentes' major impacts on the field of primatology has been his work on human and non-human primate interactions. He has worked extensively with populations of macaques in Bali and Gibraltar, where the monkeys are a large tourist attraction, focusing on the spread of diseases between humans and macaques. In 2021, Fuentes co-founded the Long-Tailed Macaque Project. He has also done extensive work in the area of human social evolution, particularly relating to the neurological aspects. Fuentes believes that increased social complexity was necessary for our interaction with the environment and within our own social groups. It is this increased complexity along with primate biology and a changing environment that he believes is responsible for the success of humans in terms of expansion beyond the limits of most animal species.

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