Young Alumni Award: Andrew Bernard ’07 Has Traveled the World To Advance Anthropological Research

Andrew Bernard ’07 was presented virtually at Alumni Weekend with the 2022 Young Alumni Award for his adventurous and important work as an anthropologist. Andrew is completing his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan. His areas of interest and research include primatology, conservation biology, climate change biology, tropical ecology and biological anthropology. The question that frames Andrew’s dissertation research is, how is climate change going to affect primates, who – like humans – are long-lived, socially complex and generally adaptable? Will they move, modify their behavior or even adapt in place? 

During 12th grade, Andrew took “Honors Environmental Science” and an elective about Modern Africa, and did his Senior Project at the Pinelands Preservation Alliance – planting seeds for his environmental consciousness, as he headed off to study at Bates College.

“All community members of primary and secondary schools will never be given enough credit for the essential role they play in developing people as learners capable of conceiving new ways of thinking, and I’m happy I have an opportunity here to thank MFS for the instrumental role it played in helping me become the learner that I am,” said Andrew.

Andrew’s world travels began during his junior year in college, when he journeyed to Tanzania, studying coastal ecology and natural resource management. Later as a field biologist, he lived in Santiago, Chile for several months studying the common degu (also known as the brush-tailed rat), and then moved on to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work with conservation biologists who were helping to create a national park. There, he conducted bird surveys, and cut and measured new trails to search for bonobos. He also studied chimpanzees at Kibale National Park in western Uganda.

In 2018, with funding from The Leakey Foundation, Andrew and two local research assistants lived in the remote montane forest of Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, in Indonesian Borneo, documenting their observation of numerous primates, including macaques, red-leaf monkeys, white-bearded gibbons and Bornean orangutans.

Andrew reflected on the importance of his field: “I’ve come to realize, through theory and experience, paraphrasing the words of anthropologist Wade Davis, that anthropology is essential because it allows us to look beneath the surface of things. The very existence of other ways of being, other ways that people think, other visions of human life itself.”

Andrew, who resides in Ann Arbor, MI, has co-authored 11 published scholarly articles. He is the lead author of “Assessing the state of knowledge of contemporary climate change and primates,” which appeared in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology in 2020, and was based on his research in Indonesia.

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