Lynne Isbell

[3]Isbell’s focus on primates came after moving to Davis, California, when she volunteered to work on a year-long behavioral project with captive bonnet macaques.

After fieldwork in the Amboseli National Park, Kenya, she received a PhD from UC Davis in 1990,[3] with a dissertation on "Influences of Predation and Resource Competition on the Social System of Vervet Monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) in Amboseli National Park, Kenya" supervised by Peter Rodman.

Her field of research is primate behavior, ecology, and evolutionary history,[3] with focuses on aspects of food competition, predation, dispersal, and ranging behaviour.

[2] Apart from Isbell's long-term fieldwork in Kenya and Uganda, she has also carried out shorter-term work in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Rwanda.

[2] Isbell has published work on the origin of primates, on predation, food competition, the ecology of social relationships, the evolution of group living, and bipedalism[3] and is the author of an award-winning book, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (2009),[2] which proposes the snake detection theory, largely attributing the advanced evolution of the visual system of primates to the need to detect snakes.