Cynthia Moss is Awarded MacArthur Fellowship

The Amboseli Trust for Elephants (AERP) is very happy to announce that Cynthia Moss has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

This program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise of important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

The following are the Foundation’s reasons for presenting her with this award:

“Cynthia Moss, a former journalist, is an incisive natural historian who has spent more than three decades intimately studying the ecology and social behavior of an entire population of some 1,000 wild African elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. By paying particular attention to behavioral differences among individual elephants, her work has provided key insights into the evolution of elephant behavior and the complex ways in which the animals respond to changes in their environment. She is dedicated to the continued survival, preservation, and well-being of this endangered species.

Moss has made Amboseli an important natural laboratory for elephant studies. Having produced one of the most extensive data sets available for any population of large animals, she is now at work synthesizing her findings and observations. In a recent report in Science, Moss demonstrates the role of matriarchs as repositories of social knowledge among African elephants, revealing an unexpected sensitivity of the species to poaching of older female elephants. Moss uses a two-pronged strategy of increasing scientific understanding of the elephant through her own research and her mentorship of young Kenyan scientists while increasing public awareness through her writing and documentaries. These efforts position her solidly as a leading force for the conservation of the African elephant.

Able to communicate with both scientists and the general public, Moss argues persuasively that how elephants behave and interact with their environment significantly affects many other species of animals and plants, including humans. Her current work of mining her rich longitudinal data sets has only just begun and promises to provide a wealth of new information on animal behavior and in support of the conservation of a species.”

The AERP congratulates Cynthia Moss on this extraordinary achievement!

For more information, see links below:

MacArthur Press Release

MacArthur Fellows Program

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