Dr. Kimberly Dingess

What does your job entail?

We’re running 24 anatomy labs this semester. Our graduate students teach those labs. I design curriculum and support them in teaching those labs, and I do physiology as well. My summer responsibilities are designing and instructing field courses and taking students abroad.

Educational background:

I went to Marshall. I graduated in 1992, in biological anthropology. I had a Spanish and political science minor. Then I went to the University of Tennessee with a strong interest in forensics. It was called physical anthropology, but it’s more biological anthropology now. I took a field course while I was there and I fell in love with it, and I’ve literally been involved in teaching field courses every year since, except for the pandemic.

Then I was accepted into Indiana University for my Ph.D. I entered their animal behavior program and specialized in primatology.

Career background:

I’ve been teaching adjunct at Marshall for nearly 15 years. In the past, I’ve offered field courses for the anthropology department at the State University of New York at Oneonta and I worked in a laboratory and conducted field research for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. I spent over two years conducting field research in Costa Rica, Mexico and Ecuador. The project was looking at the phylogenetics of Thryothorous wrens, which resulted in several collaborative publications.

For 30 years, I’ve been running field courses abroad. I’ve taken students mostly to Costa Rica and Uganda in recent years, but have also worked in Bolivia and Ecuador. In Bolivia, I managed a project on the behavior and ecology of the Bolivian gray titi monkey. I supervised and trained numerous volunteers, including Bolivian thesis students for nearly a decade.

I primarily run field courses through nonprofits, with students from Marshall and other universities. Through the DANTA Association for the Conservation of the Tropics, I bring students to Costa Rica to work with the Osa Conservation. Through the Semliki Chimpanzee Project, I bring students to Uganda for a primate behavioral conservation course.

Tell us about the Costa Rica experience.

The Costa Rica trip is a tropical biology conservation course. It’s 2½ weeks, and we travel to the Osa Peninsula, which is fabulous, with amazing biodiversity.

We spend most of our time with a conservation organization called Osa Conservation, and we’re based in the rainforest. I teach them various methods in assessing biodiversity. They work with sea turtles.

The students go out at night and do the night patrol. They’re basically checking to see how many females are nesting that night and maybe help with nest relocation to protect eggs from poachers and predators.

We go to Golfo Dulce. They do a snorkeling trip to learn about marine ecosystems.

They visit a sustainable agriculture project that focuses on chocolate. It’s family-run. They talk about some of the problems with shifting environments.

What does that mean for chocolate, and chocolate prices? Students troubleshoot some of those issues with them.

The last day, they spend with the Boruca indigenous community. Their major source of revenue right now is mask-making. These are traditional masks that have been done for centuries. Now they’ve become souvenirs. They’ve entered the tourism industry through making these masks. The students actually help in that process. After they’re carved, students help paint them.

I’ve been working in Costa Rica 30 years. The people there — these are my friends, and some of them feel like family. We had one student who had a birthday. They made a cake, and we had a piñata. That’s the kind of thing we can do with those long-term connections.

Tell us about the trip to Uganda.

My mentor (Kevin Hunt from Indiana University) is the reason we’re running a Uganda course. He has been running a chimpanzee field site for 30 years. He’s an active researcher in chimpanzees. He asked me, “Can you design me a field course” to help draw awareness and help support the field project. In 2006, I taught with a group from Cambridge. It’s called the Tropical Biology Association. My professor wanted me to design something similar around his chimp project. So about four years ago, we set up a primate behavioral conservation course, which is offered through his project, the Semliki Chimpanzee Project.

During the trip, we have a gorilla encounter experience. We visit Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary. We take a boat across Lake Victoria and we spend a morning there, where they talk to us about what they‘re doing. They have a whole island that is just for these chimpanzees. These are orphaned chimpanzees. They have veterinary care for them.

This year, I took one Marshall graduate student with me, Mary Zarilla. She is in the Department of Biological Sciences, and she‘s working on biodiversity of this Albertine Rift. This is where the field site is based.

What do you hope is the impact on the students when they have these experiences?

Studying abroad, you gain confidence, you gain independence. Their fear goes away. They realize the people are welcoming, and they like the food, and they‘ve learned a bit of Spanish. I think all of that translates to absolutely any job, if you have that skill of confidence. Intercultural confidence is desirable by many types of employers.

And it opens your mind and shows you that there’s not just one way of doing things.

When we’re at Osa Conservation, it’s an international camp. They have international scientists from all over the world. Students get to hear different perspectives on issues that concern them. I think it opens our minds to realizing that we can have the same problem but different solutions.

What other impact do you hope your work has?

I‘m very sensitive that money is spent well. I want to make sure it's not too expensive for our students, but also it‘s going to the people who need it because I think that‘s important to conservation. If they have revenue from conservation, then there‘s less logging, there‘s less poaching, there‘s less of these sorts of things. I hope to help minimize our ecological footprint as much as possible.

And I love the animals. It’s sad to think that animals we read about in children's books like chimpanzees and elephants and rhinos and giraffes — even species

in North America that we take for granted — are endangered. And that's on an emotional level, but I think on a very practical level, saving endangered species is good for our own survival. These are vital to our ecosystems. Ultimately, that will have an impact on us, the more species you lose. I think it‘s good to get students to care.

I think service learning is really, really important. Both of these projects involve service learning, whether we‘re helping scientists with sea turtles or helping with sustainable agriculture. It's all connected. We‘re not outside of our ecosystem looking in. We‘re part of it.

Based on your work, what have you learned that you think everybody should know?

I’ve spent a lot of my life abroad. I think it feels good. For some people, it’s scary.

But I have friends in Costa Rica and Uganda. I’ve watched their kids grow up. So I care about what’s happening there. It broadens your perspective, even your identity. I don’t know how to put my finger on it, but it makes the world less scary and more inviting.