Aleksey Maro

I am a finishing Ph.D. student in the Dudley Lab at the Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley. The title of my thesis is: Towards a wild fermentation ecology: alcohol within floral nectar and the frugivorous diet of chimpanzees.

The first chapter is titled Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees, published in Science Advances (see Publications). The second chapter, titled Urinary concentrations of a direct ethanol metabolite indicate substantial ingestion of fermenting fruit by chimpanzees was published in Biology Letters. Another chapter titled Low-level ethanol is widespread within floral nectar was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. All three chapters have received global press coverage (see Talks and interviews and the Altmetric links under the Publications).

In the fall I will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, as a Society of Science Fellow, working with Dr. Elizabeth Archie and the Amboseli Baboon Research Project.

At Amboseli I will continue field research on the microbial ecology of wild primate-consumed fruits. I plan to use nanopore sequencing to investigate the microbial communities within fruit pulp, grass corms, and other dietary items, and compare these to the genome of the fecal microbiome. These skills will facilitate future investigation into many ecological, behavioral, and microbiological topics concerning primates, and possibly help unravel the mysterious origins of directed human alcohol production. My goal is to run a research lab studying human and primate evolution relative to dietary ecology, combining empirical data collected in the field with bioinformatics and microbiological approaches in the lab.

[Curriculum Vitae]

alekseymaro@berkeley.edu