Duke University Professor of Biology and evolutionary anthropologist Jenny Tung was one of 26 individuals last month to win the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship award for her work regarding the relationship between genes and behavior in non-human primates.
Tung, 37, earned a bachelor’s degree from Duke in 2003 and went on to earn her Ph.D. from the university in 2010. Before she joined Duke’s faculty in 2012, Tung also served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.
Tung said she was filled with both shock and gratitude when she first heard she had won the award–informally known as the “Genius Grant”–typically awarded to 20-30 individuals each year who are among the most creative in their field and beyond.
“Shortly after I heard, I felt a lot of gratitude for the realization that there are people out there whom I will never know who think some of the research our lab is doing is valuable and interesting,” she said. “That’s fantastic news and validation for the type of work that we do.”
Tung said although the process for receiving the award appears transparent, the practice is relatively secretive.
“I don’t know who nominated me or who wrote letters for me. In fact, I never knew that was happening,” she said.
Tung said she doesn’t yet know how she will use the grant and hopes to take time to sit down and think about how it can best be put to use.
“I feel like the spirit of the fellowship is to use the resources to figure out how to invest in expanding your boundaries and being a little more innovative and creative,” she said.
Tung said she sees two directions in which her research could go.
“One is to expand our research beyond the species that I have mostly studied so far: baboons and Rhesus macaque,” she said. “Another is that we want to know how general these observations that we have about social interactions and gene regulation actually are.”
To do this, Tung has begun collaborating with UNC Professor of Epidemiology Allison Aiello to determine whether the observations she has made in non-human primates are parallel in humans.
Tung said her interests in evolutionary anthropology and biology began during one of her classes during her first semester as a student at Duke University.
“I don’t think I walked out of that [class] saying, ‘This is something I want to do as a career,’ but it made me really aware of the explanatory power that evolutionary approaches have for understanding the world around us,” she said. “It got me interested enough to start looking for research opportunities and additional classes.”
Tung said it is difficult to choose just one future goal, and that most of her goals have been with her throughout her career.
Among her priorities are the success of her students and the collaborative relationships she has formed with fellow scientists.
“I have some very close scientific collaborators, and the experience of working with them towards new discoveries has been one of the most rewarding things in my life,” Tung said. “I want to keep on doing those types of things maybe with different types of projects and questions over time.”
