Susan Parks is an ecologist at Syracuse University known for her research on acoustic signaling and the impact of ambient noise on communication in marine mammals.
[2] At a young age, Parks' father introduced her to recordings of whale sounds and, in a 2010 interview, Parks describes the connection between this moment and an undergraduate animal behavior class that led her to a research project with frogs and ultimately her Ph.D. research on right whales.
[13] Parks, Jennifer Miksis-Olds, and Samuel Denes have used sound to define the bounds of biological habitats.
[14] Whales vary the noises they make and Parks' research has described the soft sounds used by mother and calf pairs as 'whispers' which may avoid the unwanted attention of predators.
[17][18] After the 9/11 attacks, an unplanned collaboration between Parks, Rosalind Rolland, and a team of researchers[19][20] concluded that a short-term reduction in ship noise altered hormone levels in whales.