Marisa MacVey
Behavioral Ecology
Extra Credit (Stephen T. Emlen)
4/30/2015

Stephen T. Emlen went to college at Swarthmore College, and later earned his doctorate in Zoology from the Univeristy of Michigan. After earning his doctorate, he began working at Cornell, where is he is currently a professor of Behavioral Ecology. He was recently inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. Even though he is a full-time faculty at Cornell, he has also worked, and had positions at the National Museums of Kenya, Stanford, the University of South Florida, Griffith University in Australia, University of Queensland in Australia, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Also, Emlen has been on the executive committees and administrative boards of numerous professional organizations.
During his career, he has won many honors. In 1985, he received the William Brewster Medal from the American Ornithologists’ Union, for his outstanding research in …show more content…
His primary focus is still in Ornithology. Early on in his career, he focused on the orientation and navigation of migratory birds, and bird songs (endocement). Later in his career, he has studied the different animal societies (groups) of birds, and how individuals function within these groups. He has studied both the evolutionary and the adaptive aspects of animal behavior within this discipline. At Cornell, he has studied mating behavior- why some animals are monogamous, polygamous, polyandrous, promiscuous, etc. He also has studied group living, and the cost and benefits of such. Also, with sex differentiation, he has studied the different behaviors of the different sexes in society. Altruism and the motivation behind altruistic behavior have been studied as well. With all of this research, he, along with his students, have published over 200 works of literature on this