Exploring Comparative Primate Cognition with Dr. Reggie Gazes and Dr. Ikuma Adachi

In this episode, comparative cognitive scientist Dr. Reggie Gazes and my office neighbor Dr. Ikuma Adachi.

Reggie is an associate professor of psychology and animal behavior at Bucknell University in Lewisburg Pennsylvania. She and Ikuma overlapped as trainees in the lab of Dr. Robert Hampton at the now-named Emory National Primate Research Center.

Listen to Rob in episode 20 of the podcast on mental time travel and metacognition.

In the interview here, we find out how her experiences in Rob’s lab translated into Reggie’s own approach to being a teacher-scholar at Bucknell University.

Since a large part of what Reggie does involves engaging, supporting and doing research alongside undergraduate students, I thought it fitting to ask for their input in designing the interview, which can be thought of as a sort of collaboration with them.

Along with Reggie riffing on Bunny the dog, teaching students like she trains her monkeys, and - spoiler alert! - why she won’t go to karaoke with her students, we talk at length about the nuts and bolts of doing comparative cognitive science, and particularly in the context of animals in social groups.

Some key studies done by Reggie and her lab mates that are a great primer for this conversation include her work on factors influencing touchscreen work in rhesus macaques and how social networks predict learning outcomes in capuchins. 

She really gets across in our conversation just how important it is to consider the rich social lives of animals when trying to design cognitive tests and understand how they think and why.

These are the kinds of things that would really matter to individual primates living under natural conditions, so it was great hearing Reggie’s thoughts on how this type of cognitive experimentation was gaining more and more traction, despite its many challenges!

Other topics covered in the interview:

• TikTok's Bunny the dog
• peanut butter sandwiches
• mentorship and role models
• teaching and scholarship
• imposter syndrome and the importance of collaboration

For more on Reggie Gazes and the 'Awesomeness' of her work, check out the Comparative Cognition & Behavior at Bucknell lab. 

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves. Credits by Kasia Majewski.

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Consider sending us an email or reaching out on social media to give us your thoughts on this and any other interview in the series. We're always happy to hear from you and hope to continue improving our podcast format based on your comments and suggestions.

A podcast from Kyoto University and CICASP.

Transcript

Andrew MacIntosh: 0:00

After the tune an interview with Dr Reggie Gazes of Bucknell University on teaching and scholarship in comparative primate cognition. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the primate cast. I'm your host, andrew Macintosh of Kyoto University's Wildlife Research Center, and the podcast is brought to you by the Center for International Collaboration and Advanced Studies in Primatology at Kyoto University's Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior. For this episode I sat down in the studio with Dr Reggie Gazes and my colleague next door, dr Ikuma Adachi, to talk about comparative primate cognition. Reggie was visiting a research institute with a few undergraduate students as part of a training and exchange program hosted by Ikuma in his lab. Reggie is an associate professor of psychology and animal behavior at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, pennsylvania. She and Ikuma overlapped as trainees in the lab of Dr Robert Hampton at the now-named Emery National Primate Research Center. We had Rob in episode number 20 of the podcast for anyone who might be interested, when we talked about mental time travel and metacognition. Ikuma is on that show as well, along with some other excellent guests talking about animal cognition. But in the interview here we find out how her experiences in Rob's lab translated into Reggie's own approach to being a teacher scholar at Bucknell University. I loved her enthusiasm and energy when she was speaking about engaging her students through research and primate cognition, and I already had that sense, actually, from a few prior interactions and from the fact that she was here in Japan supporting some undergraduates in this training opportunity. So I did something a little unorthodox I canvassed them for some questions, and so the interview itself can be thought of as a sort of collaboration with them. And, wow, did they help me load the deck.

Andrew MacIntosh: 2:11

So, along with Reggie riffing on Bunny the Dog, teaching students like she trains her monkeys and, spoiler alert, why she won't go to karaoke with her students here, sorry folks, we talk at length about the nuts and bolts of doing comparative cognitive science, and particularly in the context of animals in social groups. In a seminar she did for us at Kyoto University, reggie told us about her studies looking at how different individuals are better or worse at learning certain tasks and how these relate to their social contexts, like what rank they occupy in the group or how embedded they are in their social networks. We'll link to some of those in the show notes, but these are the kind of things that would really matter to individual primates living under natural conditions. So it was great hearing Reggie's thoughts on how this type of cognitive experimentation was gaining more and more traction despite its many challenges.

Andrew MacIntosh: 3:03

Listening to this interview, I think you'll come away, as I did, with the sense that Reggie's a really caring and thoughtful teacher-scholar and hopefully you'll learn a lot from the various lessons she and Akuma share here. And hey, her department is hiring, so if you think all this sounds great and she'd make a wonderful colleague, then get in touch with her. She provides a few details toward the end of the interview, links again in the show notes. So I'm really excited to share this conversation with all of you. So to do that, here are Reggie and Akuma in the studio with yours truly. I want to throw like a weird off the wall question to you to get started, which is and I'm not going to lie, I didn't come up with this myself, but what's the deal with Bunny the Dog?

Reggie Gazes: 3:49

We were just talking about Bunny the Dog, oh yeah, well, so you know who Bunny the Dog is.

Andrew MacIntosh: 3:54

I have no idea who Bunny the Dog is.

Reggie Gazes: 3:55

Okay, so Bunny the Dog is a very famous TikTok dog who uses these buttons to communicate, so buttons that say like outside, or bunny, or food, or whatever it happens to be, and so this has gotten a lot of press. People love watching Bunny the TikTok dog and it comes up in classes a lot, so animal behavior courses or comparative cognition courses, my students always want to talk about Bunny the Dog and of course it's, you know, a really interesting example of one of those cases where we have, like this, one animal doing this thing that seems so incredible, but we don't have any of the science to tell us exactly what's going on right. So, like we don't know how Bunny was trained and we don't have footage of Bunny every day for her whole life to know. You know how much of this is. We only get to see the one time she produces something that makes sense out of 4,000 times they don't make sense.

Reggie Gazes: 4:52

How much of it is specific reinforcement of sequences, right, which we know animals can do, and there are some scientists now who are working on this question because these buttons have become highly available. You can order them on Amazon. People have their cats using them, their dogs using them, so I know there's some folks in the dog world who are working on trying to answer these questions, but yeah, it's definitely a fun topic to get students into conversations around communication and training and even like research methodology, because it's, yes, kind of fun.

Andrew MacIntosh: 5:20

Okay, so I hadn't heard of Bunny, but I do know and I use a little bit in my comparative cognition class the story of Stella the dog which is maybe a well better known example of this, but is this kind of the same idea?

Reggie Gazes: 5:35

Yeah, I think it's pretty, yeah, it's, and it's kind of like speaking to a new generation and you know, like chaser the dog, rico, right? So these are like very specific one animal who can do this, like amazing thing, right. And that always comes up in comparative cognition when you're thinking about, you know, capacity versus like abilities, and whether one animal doing a thing tells us that that species has this particular cognitive capacity, or whether that's really just like a one-off anecdote, right? And as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data, right. So you know, we need better studies to really understand what's going on.

Andrew MacIntosh: 6:09

I think so in addition to Reggie here in the studio we have Ikuma Natchi again with us, who's kind of hosting during this time. We'll get into that in a second, but I think with the chimpanzees as well. Here you have kind of similar storylines too, like you might have some what you could call quote unquote savant chimpanzees out there, and I wonder if you want to make it a comment on that as well.

Ikuma Adachi: 6:31

Well, I guess it's really important point brought by Reggie now, like capacity versus like what is going on as a species, for example. I mean both are important line of studies as far as it's scientifically approached I would say. So Rico's case or those others good examples. The first things they came is basically just phenomena. They seem to have this and then the question is whether or not they actually do that or they just happen to show the similar phenomena by totally different mechanisms. So we need to understand what is behind those behaviors.

Ikuma Adachi: 7:07

People can easily answer more, for it's like oh, I cannot say that. You can say that Anthropomorphize, anthropomorphize their behavior and then we try to understand their behavior based on our own cognition or cognitive systems, but that's something being your wrong direction, right? So scientifically we need to approach and we need to understand what is behind. So in that sense, chimpanzee, yes, we are also often based on a small number of subjects, but still we want to take it as a group as much as we can. But meanwhile, even if it's a limited example, we want to understand what they can do as a capacity that they have. So both question we actually are interested in.

Andrew MacIntosh: 7:50

So I know dogs. Reggie is not really your main son.

Andrew MacIntosh: 7:53

He's a species, but I'm kind of just to belabor the point a little bit more, I know that recently there's been kind of a renaissance in research with dogs, particularly in the realm of cognition, and I wonder, just from your perspectives as comparative cognitive scientists, how do you see that like the origins of that, and why did it kind of take so long for people to get really interested in this, given you know how familiar they are to us? That's kind of an interesting, I think, development.

Reggie Gazes: 8:20

Yeah, it is weird actually you're right that it took so long to get there because people are really interested in dogs. And then you know the flip side of that too is very few people are looking at cats in cognition. I think in part that's just practical. Cats are very difficult to work with friends that we have that work with them. You know it's a struggle but but you know, these animals that we spend so much of our daily lives with, we actually don't know all that much about.

Reggie Gazes: 8:43

And I think in part the interest in dog cognition now of course it's related to the fact that humans love dogs and they are such a part of our lives, but I think there's also a lot of practical reasons why a lot of folks have moved to dogs. It's becoming increasingly difficult to do research with primates in captivity and to get access to to any animals right. It's very expensive. A lot of facilities are shutting down and so looking for study species that you can access easily that are of interest from either an evolutionary perspective or a domestication perspective or just a human welfare and interaction perspective, you know dogs are a great option there. So I think there's a lot of layers to why the dog stuff has gotten so popular lately.

Ikuma Adachi: 9:25

I read, I mean, and also again, we I think we human sometimes overconfidence about we understand their behavior because they do something that you want, yeah, but again, if you come to the evolution perspective or domestication perspective, as Reggie said, we need to understand their behavior and mechanism, what make them do that, so it can be very interesting species in that sense yeah and practical reason too. So that's how the public attention and scientific interest can come together.

Andrew MacIntosh: 10:03

Yeah, okay, so enough about dogs for dog. So I want to. I want to talk a little bit about why you're here, reggie, and, and we can hear from you. Come on that as well. But so you, you arrived here I think it was at maybe the beginning of July or late June. You have a contingent of undergrads as well from Bucknell University.

Andrew MacIntosh: 10:27

You yourself, in the past, were one of those undergrads at Bucknell University yeah, so that might come up as well, but can you just give us a brief summary of what you're doing here?

Reggie Gazes: 10:37

yeah, so my, there's four undergraduate students with me on this trip.

Reggie Gazes: 10:42

We got a grant in 2019 from the Asian Network, which is a consortium of institutions in the states that are interested in promoting the liberal arts in Asia, basically, and so they have these student faculty fellow grants that you can apply for, where the students in the faculty work together to develop a project to go somewhere in Asia to study something, and so our project idea at the time was we have this group of undergraduate students who work at the primate facility at Bucknell, so we have a primate lab on campus, which is pretty unique for a primarily undergraduate institution, and all of these students have been working there doing research and obviously taking courses in how we study animal behavior and cognition in the states.

Reggie Gazes: 11:28

But we got really interested in understanding a little bit more about the differences and the similarities in how primatology is studied in Japan, you know, because the history there of primatology in Japan and in the West, you know, kind of developed in parallel for a while, but independent of one another, and then came together, and I think there are some some differences in the way questions are asked, in the way data are interpreted, the way the animals are treated and the spaces that we were really interested in exploring, and so that was. We were supposed to be here in the summer of 2020. For many reasons, that didn't happen, and we are here now in the summer of 2023. So we've been shadowing Ikuma students, who have been awesome, showing us around, letting us observe their experiments and then also working on developing some long-term collaborative ideas that Ikuma and I have been working to develop since 2017 probably.

Andrew MacIntosh: 12:21

Yeah, to try to get some more exchange between our students and our facilities so I think you can imagine that we'd be really interested in people's perceptions of how kind of science is being done similarly and differently in these different places. We had formerly Pamela Asquith was an anthropologist who met a primatologist, who studied the history of primatology and kind of philosophy of how the science is being done in these two places and she herself spent a number of or a good amount of time in Japan observing primatologists, going to the field with them and then writing about these kind of differences.

Andrew MacIntosh: 12:53

But from your perspective, and maybe on the more comparative cognition side, what were the kind of things that interested you most in that respect?

Reggie Gazes: 13:01

well, yeah, so you know we're focusing pretty much on comparative cognition, captive, primate kind of cognitive work, and I think the things that my students got the most interested in were basically the line between humans and animals right and where you draw that line and which direction do you approach the science from right?

Reggie Gazes: 13:20

so when we think about cognitive questions, there's a few ways we can approach them right. So we can come at it from humans do this thing. Do chimpanzees also do this thing? Right? You know, sort of, are we more similar than we might think, right? And there's a lot of amazing research questions that kind of come out of that perspective. And then there's also the opposite side of things, which is, you know, how do animals solve things? How do humans solve things?

Reggie Gazes: 13:47

And often where that lands, you, is that maybe humans aren't as great as we think they are at certain things, right, that, like, we often overcomplicate what humans are actually doing and that it may be a little bit simpler, and so we've explored this and read a lot of Western primatologists and comparative psychologists talking about these differences. But when you look at the history of primatology in Japan and the way that primatology started and the amazing ideas of how to study animals that have come out of the work in Japan, like naming animals, right, it's this really basic one, but it's such a different perspective, right? It implies that these animals are individuals that have individual behaviors that are relevant, that they're part of a collective group right that act together and that that's also relevant versus kind of the Western historical tradition of at least cognitive work, you know, like Harlow and that where maybe the animals don't have names and they're not particularly interesting.

Reggie Gazes: 14:45

They're models of something that you're asking, and so I think that was something that our students had a real interest in was just this perspective of like animals and the continuum of animals and humans.

Andrew MacIntosh: 14:55

Anecdote on that. I was just listening recently to an interview with John Mitani on the Talking Gapes podcast, another kind of primatology adjacent or related podcast, and he was talking about the original naming of the Ongogo chimpanzees or talking about Chimp Empire, this Netflix documentary, and so they were originally named after jazz musicians, I think. He and David Watts started research and had Ongogo and eventually they ran out of, I guess, jazz musicians that they knew or famous jazz musicians, but so that leads to a different kind of problem a cognitive issue that humans might have about that.

Andrew MacIntosh: 15:31

In Japan there are different systems, like on Kochima, where primatology was started in Japan, I think, historically and certainly now, females are and males are named differently. So the females are given plant names and the males are given animal names, and that seems to have been persisting for quite some time. I don't know if it's right for me that's really interesting. Yeah. And so I wonder yeah, I don't know, yukumaf, you know like how the chimpanzees here were?

Ikuma Adachi: 15:58

named here. I, you know, I don't know.

Ikuma Adachi: 16:03

Okay, some of them are named after the actress. That's what I know. I is named after the famous actress on the time, but some of them actually came with a name already. So we don't name everyone, every single individual here, but I mean for the infant wise, it's clear. Just, we pick the name starting from the same character, basically from the mother right, so that we can keep track. You know the lineage, family lineage, based on that Right, I and I, you move. Yeah, for example, pan and Paul, yeah.

Andrew MacIntosh: 16:34

Chloe and Kuyo. Yes, yeah, that's our practice too. Yeah, in our lab as well. Yeah, so how? Maybe you can talk then about the primate lab that you have at Bucknell. Now I think I heard you mentioned that it has kind of an interesting origin story.

Reggie Gazes: 16:51

Yeah, if it's accurate. Yeah, so this is one of those like apocryphal things, like I've never seen it in print so I'm not positive. It's true, but the story goes that the reason we have a primate lab at Bucknell is that Doug Candlin, who started our program, was an animal behaviorist, primatologist. That he got a call from Carpenter who had been in Japan after World War Two doing some work with scientific development, and that I guess the government of Japan had offered him as a thank you a troop of Japanese monkeys. And he never put them. So he called Doug and said would you take these monkeys? And he went to the university and said, hey, would you build me an enclosure for monkeys? And that began the whole thing.

Reggie Gazes: 17:37

Like I said, don't know if that's true, but now we don't have Japanese macaques anymore. I'm not actually sure what happened to the original troop. We have a group of homodryus baboons, we have a group of tufted capuchin monkeys and we have a group of squirrel monkeys. So total we have about 50 monkeys on campus and they're involved in teaching. So our students take courses in the lab. We have classrooms there doing behavioral observations, cognitive research, and then they support the research for the faculty and for the students there.

Andrew MacIntosh: 18:09

Yeah, that's really interesting that perspective. So I know a lot of our perceptions might be that labs like that primate labs are there to support the research activities of the faculty and whoever collaborators and students as well graduate students but you just mentioned that they're also an important teaching tool and I'm not sure I've heard that so often that it's as integrated. So is that really like a focus then of the department too, so that this is really an important teaching opportunity and role for that place as well?

Reggie Gazes: 18:43

Yeah, oh yeah, I mean. So Bucknell it's a primarily undergraduate institution, which means like, while we have a master's degree program, we don't have PhD students. We don't really have postdocs to speak of. There's a few, so the research that happens on campus is done by the undergraduate students working with the faculty, and the faculty's main job is teaching. So we teach undergraduate courses and so integrating our scholarship into our teaching is a big part of what we do.

Reggie Gazes: 19:13

And, yeah, so our Bucknell has an animal behavior major which is very old I think it's been 55 years, maybe longer than that that the major has been around and it's an interdisciplinary program between the biology department and the psychology department and it really focuses on behavior and the primates have just always been a big part of that. And so our students, like I said, take courses in that and that's very important for us that they get that kind of training and experience. But they're also heavily involved in the lab. So we have a student training team who works with our primates doing, like, the husbandry training, and that's amazing because lots of our students want to go on to zookeeper work or animal training stuff, so they can get that experience as undergraduate students. I mean, we have a lot of pre vet students that want time working with students, with the animals, and then, of course, the research. So we have many students, like the four that are here, that are interested in the scholarship side of things too.

Ikuma Adachi: 20:07

Right.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:08

So maybe this, this is something where the two the two of you, by the way you've kind of known each other for a really long time, right, so we can digress for a second. You were graduate students together, is that correct? Or you were a postdoc. I was a postdoc and you were a student.

Reggie Gazes: 20:22

I was a baby grad student. Yeah, I think it was my second year that you got there. So yeah, we worked together for a few years, right next to each other in a tiny little lab.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:33

That was in the lab of Rob Hampton.

Reggie Gazes: 20:35

Yes, yes, At Emory National Primary Research Center Currently. Yes, oh, currently it was the Akis National Primary Research Center.

Ikuma Adachi: 20:42

Right, it changed the name to the Emory, Emory State National Primary.

Reggie Gazes: 20:46

Research Center.

Ikuma Adachi: 20:47

I think it's the one Emory Primary Research Center.

Reggie Gazes: 20:49

I don't know. We apologize, Emory, for screwing that up.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:51

We'll get the show. We'll get that in the show notes. Misrepresent the place, but yeah, we had. So Rob. I met Rob. He came here in 2014 for an animal psychology conference that we had in Inuyama that Tetsuro Matsuzawa put on, and he did a little interview for us for the primary.

Andrew MacIntosh: 21:07

Yes as well, but super interesting guy and super fascinating research. So what? Maybe both of you can kind of refund what you felt the experience was like working with Rob and the kind of opportunities you had in the lab. There I read you. Let's start with you.

Reggie Gazes: 21:21

It was awesome. I was Rob's first grad student. Ben Basil and I were the first two. We came in together, and then Akuma was the first postdoc, and so for a long time the lab was really just the three of us and our research technicians, and we had just a ton of opportunities to really do what we wanted. Yeah, I mean, we got to work with the Rhesus monkeys in the lab. Rob set up sound attenuating booths for Akuma's research projects. I mean, he supported me in my like completely insane idea to set up touchscreens for the big social groups of Rhesus at the field station, which was something I always wanted to do but never thought I'd get a chance to do, and he made it happen. And that was amazing. So, yeah, I think. And and we got a chance to work at the zoo and meet Sarah Brosnan, like meet the whole crew at Georgia State. We worked really closely with them too.

Reggie Gazes: 22:14

So I was really great.

Ikuma Adachi: 22:18

Same here and he's very energetic and sincere in science, which affect a lot to my career, I think, and how you want to operate the lab also. I learned a lot from him.

Ikuma Adachi: 22:30

Oh, yes, I mean he has no hesitation to spend with the students I mean spend time with the students to discuss each topic and also think about the future plan together and he's always supportive. So I really learned a lot from him and, as Reggie mentioned, he also helping us to network him with the people in states and in Atlanta more specifically, but not only in the states, sorry, not only in Atlanta. Wherever you join a conference together, he's just introducing people always to you and introducing you to the old people. So that's a really amazing experience. I got there.

Andrew MacIntosh: 23:12

Yeah, I had that sense he had this kind of very gregarious nature. Yeah, yeah, and we really.

Reggie Gazes: 23:16

I think you know what Akuma just said about like what we learned from Rob. You know the methodology and the careful way of thinking about data and of making sure to run follow up experiments so that you're really clear on what it is that's going on. I think was something that we all got out of that experience and has definitely shaped the way that we all ask our research questions. Remember, somebody once told me they said Rob Hampton is one of the only scientists who's famous for careful methodology rather than like exciting findings, and I really think that that's like a really good way to explain it that, like, you can always trust that something that he says is is accurate and has been like vetted a thousand times with a million experiments, and I think we all strive for that based on that experience.

Andrew MacIntosh: 24:09

I think I remember a paper he published that was in response to the various criticisms of this metacognition work that he'd done and I think in the, in the paper, something like we set up these 11 experiments or something to follow up all the potential, and even at the end of it you know he still sounds very measured and it's not- trying to say this is exactly right, We've you know excluded all of these other possibilities. So he's really sincere in the science, yeah.

Ikuma Adachi: 24:36

Um well, when I was young, young, right after I start my post, I feel sometimes like it's too much called, a little bit tiring, or you know, because I want to just publish paper but I could never, ever reach the agreement. No, but that helped you a lot, yeah, how to think about data, how to think about your methodology and later on, just I like it more and more. And well, to be honest, I want to do the same way to my students too.

Ikuma Adachi: 25:03

But, sometimes we still have a pressure to like publish paper and bringing up the major effect first and then open to the whole society to think about it. That's more excited that I am shifting to, but I'm still. The way that he approached to the question is one of the greatest attitude I have never I have ever seen. Yeah, we admire that You're right.

Reggie Gazes: 25:26

We I don't think we ever published a paper with less than four experiments, which you know as a grad student is so frustrating because you're like I've done so much work. This was like five years of work. It's one paper, but it was like you have to tell the whole story and you have to follow up and it's definitely, yeah, taken into the way that we all do our science now.

Andrew MacIntosh: 25:45

And how about the way you do your mentoring? So now you talked about coming here to Japan with under.

Reggie Gazes: 25:49

I mean, I find that story itself fascinating.

Andrew MacIntosh: 25:51

You, you have this undergraduate program, and in the way you talked about it earlier, you made it sound as well that the undergrads had these things, that they were interested in, not just that, you were telling them they should be interested in, and so I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. So what is your experience working at this primarily undergraduate institution, where you have this private lab doing cognitive experiments and they're all part of that while being trained but also doing some of the research?

Reggie Gazes: 26:17

Oh, I mean it's great. So obviously I chose that particular position because I have an interest in working with undergraduate students. As you said, I went to Bucknell. So I was really lucky to work with Peter Judge, who is the other primatologist though he's retiring this year, oh yeah. So, and he was my mentor when I was an undergraduate student and I mean taught me so much about everything right about animal behavior and experiments and research questions that let me then go on to grad school right and ask the questions that I that I was able to ask after that, and so I know how valuable that can be. So it's been really fun. I mean, working with undergraduate students is awesome. Like they're so enthusiastic, you know they come up with great experiment ideas.

Reggie Gazes: 27:00

So many of the coolest things that I've done since getting my faculty position have been because of undergrads who got excited about ideas. So we got started down this path of looking at cortisol, particularly in hair cortisol, because Ali Schrock, who is now a grad student at Duke working with Christine Dre, she was interested in that and she was working in my lab and she was like, could we make that happen? I don't know, can we? And so we figured it out Some of the social networking stuff that we do.

Reggie Gazes: 27:30

That was really driven by Meredith Lutz, who is a PhD student now at UC Davis, who was just really interested in networking and figured out how to set it up for the lab and taught the rest of us and we all kind of like ran from there. So, like you know, it's just like having grad students really like they drive a lot of the cool questions that you get to ask and take you in directions you never thought you'd go, and it's also kind of fun because you get to help them make some life decisions. The sad part is most of them don't end up going into science. You know, I think like you train PhD students, a lot of them will kind of stay in the sciences. So you don't always get to see them again, you know, at your professional meetings and things, but it's fun.

Andrew MacIntosh: 28:06

But how do you, how do you approach that then? Because I think maybe for us at primarily research institutions, where we mostly interact with graduate students, I think a lot of times the expectation is, as you say, that at least a large proportion of folks who kind of are invested in the idea of staying in the academy to some degree. I think that's changing and obviously the competition for jobs is such that it's unrealistic to expect that everybody's going to have that path, and nor should they. I mean, I think we should maybe stop having that expectation that people must do a PhD to become a professor. There are many other reasons why you might want to do that, but do you feel like you have to take a different approach with undergrad? Or how do you then help them see, through working with you and working in a primatology lab, the other kind of skill sets they're building that they can use towards whatever future career they might have?

Reggie Gazes: 28:57

Yeah, you know it's a good question. I think it varies student to student, right. But we're at a liberal arts institution. We very heavily push the idea that, like, having a well rounded education is just going to make you qualified to go out into the real world and get a job and have a life right, and being a competent Interpreter of science is just part of that right. And so I mean I know you share the interest in science communication, right?

Reggie Gazes: 29:24

So I've always been interested in science communication in some ways. There's no better way to do that than to teach people how to interpret science right, because when you do it yourself, then you go out and you see some news piece 10 years after you graduate, when you're an investment banker, you know you know how to say, like, I'm gonna critically think about this before I take this for just the face value, right. So I think a lot of it is just the mentality of like we are. We're training people to be Humans who understand information and understand how to make decisions and how to evaluate facts, and that's just part of science in general. But yeah, other than that, you know, you just try and get students who are interested in what you do and get them interested in the questions that you're asking, and I think that usually does it yeah, especially when they're the ones that came up with.

Reggie Gazes: 30:12

Of course, like with grad students to write, it's a lot of shaping because you know students come with great ideas, or big ideas that aren't necessarily feasible or that have already been answered or that you know. Just like you could never answer, you have to. You have to shrink the questions down into little bits and pieces, but it's that's the fun part, right.

Ikuma Adachi: 30:30

It's a great learning experience. Yeah, what about you wanna have a heavy in your mind as a goal? You have to think about how to approach it, step by step or part by part.

Andrew MacIntosh: 30:42

What about you? You can say you, as I mentioned already, you know we mostly are dealing with graduate students here in the campus university, but do you have that conversation to some about? You know whether folks want to continue in academia or not and what?

Ikuma Adachi: 30:58

I, especially recently, I have never, ever tried to make them believe that they have to be in academia, because there's so many pathways that they can take by, still want to encourage them to keep interested in the science of these. And how? You again, what is your question and what? How you want to approach it can vary across all people and students, so it's very difficult for me to just uniform the idea.

Reggie Gazes: 31:27

I don't want to even do that Sure.

Ikuma Adachi: 31:30

And so instead of really teaching them like what should and what they should approach, but instead I just more like casting so many information, including general reading club, for example. Just grab whatever you are interested in and share with other people and discuss in science and scientific language too. Hopefully just it can encourage them to just, you know, have their own find first, find their own interest and dig into that and also keep the broader interest as a scientific, you know, approaching. That's what I can try to do now. The broad interest is so important.

Andrew MacIntosh: 32:05

It's one of the reasons why psycats started the in the am a nerds that we had many years ago. I know where you know, following nerd night this I don't know if you know nerd night, but it's like a, something that was started in the United States by some folks who interested in communication, science, communication with the art, communication, whatever. But they organized these events at a bar, cafe or something.

Andrew MacIntosh: 32:26

You would have a set of speakers on various different topics and folks would go and have fun, drinks and food and we started that here in our cafeteria and some evenings and the idea was really we don't focus so much on your academic research field or studies, but Pick some organizers organizers, students from our graduate student body, but like volunteer and just organize an event open, few speakers, maybe the event is on death, and so you have a few speakers talking different aspects of death. Maybe the event is on time, and so you know, one of our organizers brought in a teacher from a local international school from now it was a physicist to talk about, you know, relative. I don't remember exactly what the topic was.

Ikuma Adachi: 33:07

It seems like that right, so we have.

Andrew MacIntosh: 33:09

The idea is that people can actually spend time and focus on things that are not their science but still have like a bit of an academic bent or you know a way this kind of we can teach each other about the things we're interested in, and I just think the things like that seem so valuable, but when especially in the for graduate students we tend to specialize so much, that's hard to kind of get outside of that and realize these other things that we bring to the table.

Andrew MacIntosh: 33:35

So I guess with undergrad it's still a bit different, because the folks are still quite young and just really formulating who they are, who they want to be, and so it's kind of an exciting time as well.

Reggie Gazes: 33:43

Yeah, it's almost the opposite. Like it's, you know, you have graduate students who are so focused and so into their science, right that that's like all they think about With undergraduates when they start in the lab. Oftentimes they literally don't know anything about the science right.

Reggie Gazes: 33:57

They haven't even taken an animal behavior course or cognition course, and so you're really starting from scratch and so that can generate some really cool ideas and questions. But then you also have to like sort of catch up on the on the other stuff. But they definitely have big broad interests right that come from the fact that they're also, like whatever, really involved in music on campus and, like you know, taking English classes and all kinds of cool things.

Andrew MacIntosh: 34:19

And maybe it's a good opportunity to transition more into the science and talk about what you're doing, what you've done and maybe where your works have overlapped as well. So I found a few, I mean just keywords. Wise, I know you've worked on kind of similar topics To some degree. Kuma, transitivity, I think, reggie, that's something that's been quite prevalent in your work. Ordering and our kind of natural inclinations to order things. I think you overlap in there. So maybe I'll leave it up to you. I don't usually do this, but where do you want to start thinking about the kind of work that you're doing these days?

Reggie Gazes: 34:49

Oh, that's where it came from.

Reggie Gazes: 34:51

That's our question, I guess. Yeah, I mean, the stuff I'm doing these days, I think, falls into two major categories. So you know, I came up in the kind of cognitive and comparative cognition world and so I ask a lot of questions that are pretty much pure cognition. I think he kuma has the same thing right about mechanisms of how animals solve certain tasks and what that means, about how they think or how they learn or how they remember information. But then I also kind of have this I don't want to say newer now because I've been doing this for a while but another arm of my work that's more interested in kind of the intersection between behavior and cognition and what's going on in an animal's daily life, and how does that relate to either how they perform on cognitive tasks or how they're able to learn or perform on cognitive tasks.

Reggie Gazes: 35:38

So we kind of these two parallel things going at the same time.

Andrew MacIntosh: 35:42

I think we recently not that recent a few months ago we had Sarah Brosnan on the podcast and you, kuma, was in the studio for that as well, and she mentioned something that overlaps a lot with something I heard you say the other day during your seminar, which is that sometimes if you just sit back I'll paraphrase sit back and watch the animals that you're studying in their own kind of social niche, A lot of things kind of jump out at you or become apparent, and maybe it was in the context of talking about transitivity, which I think we often think of in the context of competition, why an animal's need to understand to kind of rank order of other individuals.

Andrew MacIntosh: 36:18

But your observation was that they don't spend most of their time doing that right, like being competitive or fighting, or they spend a lot of time affiliating, and so I wonder if maybe, so there's certainly some, I think, general patterns there, that what happens when you kind of watch the animals that you have access to, and I wonder if you could talk about that how that's kind of inspired the different questions you've started to ask.

Reggie Gazes: 36:42

Yeah, I think that's.

Reggie Gazes: 36:43

It's definitely been very inspirational to hang out with the animals. So we're lucky at Bucknell that our primate colonies are housed in large social groups, but they're also we're able to separate them out to test them. So it's actually kind of similar to the chimpanzees here at eHub and that's one of the things actually that we talked about with my students in coming here. Was that actually like the Bucknell way of doing things is pretty unique in the States, but it's actually not that dissimilar to what's done here. So there's there's some similarities in their experiences across these two facilities. But because we have these animals housed in these big social groups, you know we're able to look at their behavior and then we're also able to ask them cognitive questions in these controlled environments, and so, yeah, we started spending some time observing them and that was something that you know I've always been interested in behavior, but I did my postdoc at Zoo Atlanta with Tara Stowinsky and one of the things that I really learned from Tara was the value of behavioral data sets, Like even when you're not sure what you're going to do with it. If you are watching your animals and you're recording what they're doing and you keep doing that so many things can be answered from that data set. Like it may be 10 years from now that you're going to sit down and look at it, but you, you have all of that information and and so when I started at Bucknell, the first thing we did was we set up a behavioral observation program and we just started observing our animals all the time and collecting that data and then looking at it. It's just been so interesting and so informative and so many questions have come out of it.

Reggie Gazes: 38:13

And now that we have these big data sets, we know so much detail about the lives of each of these animals. You know, we know their rank in the group, we know who they affiliate with. We know who initiates those affiliations right, so we have directional data which is really fascinating to us, Because we have some animals who affiliate a lot but, like they're never the ones to initiate it. What is that telling us about? About them? Yeah, we know how much aggression they receive. We know how much time they spend feeding, right. Just all sorts of little details.

Reggie Gazes: 38:41

And, yeah, it has been very informative for us to think about those animals as individuals and how that plays into the cognition that they need to use day to day, or you know bigger things that we think relate to some human questions about how does the environment that you're in predict either how you learn things and or how you perform, because those are not the same right? So we know from our students that you can study really hard for a test and know everything, and you can still bomb it right. Right, it doesn't necessarily. Performance and learning aren't exactly the same thing, and the same is true in animals, right? Like we know, the environment can influence performance for many reasons, right, Social reasons. Animals might be reluctant to do something that's going to earn them a reward if they have a dominant animal standing next to them. There's tons of great data out there that show those kinds of things, and so we're really interested in looking at those questions, and we can now.

Andrew MacIntosh: 39:33

As a behavioral ecologist who studies wild primates and has for quite a while now, I mean, that's always been kind of my interest is in how you know what might be different between how the animals perform, whether they're on cognitive tests or just behaviorally. In a context like this, which is quite removed from the places they evolved, how would it kind of compare to the animals in the wild? And I think when you talk now, reggie, about having the interest in studying social groups and their behavior, that's really fascinating to me. But I also wonder what are the major challenges then of trying to transition a research program into doing it that way.

Reggie Gazes: 40:10

The transition I think to, at least, to testing animals in a social group setting, I think, is mostly just that it has to be voluntary when you do it that way, and so you often just lose a bunch of subjects that don't want to participate right.

Reggie Gazes: 40:25

So if you have animals in a lab environment where they're housed let's say a pair housed and you have access to them at any point, your access is easy. The animals generally are enthusiastic about participating in research when they have their whole social lives. As we've talked about, there's reasons they may not want to participate for social reasons or just because they don't want to participate right. So they have other things going on and we published a paper a few years back looking at the big testing system that we set up for the Rhesus monkeys at Emory primate center where we had four touchscreens, computers set up in an enclosure that had about 120 Rhesus monkeys in it and the monkeys all had RFID chips so they could come up and use the touchscreens anytime they wanted and we got data on who was using it, when they were using it, and we were interested in looking at who works and when do they work and how do the social dynamics influence who's working at the same time, things like that. And basically what we learned is all of those things matter. So seasonality, like breeding season and birthing season, the use of the touchscreens goes down dramatically. When an animal has a baby, they stop working for a while. So parody had a big role the age of the individuals, who else is on the screen? So we found that if you looked at the peak working times in a given day, based on rank in the group, they staggered themselves. So we'd have sort of a peak from the high ranking individuals and then a separate peak later in the day from the mid-rankers and then another peak at a different time of day for the low ranking animals.

Reggie Gazes: 41:57

So it was just kind of cool to see that all these things that we think probably influence who's going to participate and how they're going to participate do. But that's just stuff you have to figure out. You also lose some control, as Ikuma pointed out, when you bring them into a lab space where you have them by themselves. In a space you can control the lighting, you can control the sound, you can control the social environment. When you're testing animals in a big group you don't have any of that control, or you have some of it. I mean you can get some of it, but it's not quite as easy to get all of it.

Andrew MacIntosh: 42:27

Are there specific things, then, that you this is kind of like a general question about almost what you're doing now to what happens next, but where do you see the major advantages or what are the major questions that you think are kind of really important to answer when you think of the animals performing in the context of groups that you wouldn't have then when they're doing it in isolation?

Reggie Gazes: 42:50

I think for me, the thing that I'm most interested in is we have like 80 years of amazing data on, say, learning. We know a lot about learning processes, basic learning, how it works in many different species across species, but almost all of that data comes from animals by themselves, and it's great because we've been able to really characterize the mechanisms. But the reality is nothing in cognition evolved with an animal by itself, right at least more time primates, so that learning or memory or whatever other cognitive process we're talking about evolved in the context of living in a group, and so I think where we're at now in the field is that it's on us to say, okay, so we know the basics of how these processes work, but how do they work in real life when you put them in a group and you put these animals together the way they would be living normally, and what does that tell us about the evolution of those processes? And I'm not not to say I'm the only one doing this. A lot of people are trying to understand this better.

Reggie Gazes: 43:49

But I do think that's where the field is headed is in trying to now like take it out of the lab and put it Obviously I'm still in a lab, but put it in a little bit less of a controlled environment to start to understand how that might change or how our understanding of those mechanisms might shift a little bit when we add the social context back in.

Andrew MacIntosh: 44:07

Do you then follow a lot of the kind of field cognition?

Reggie Gazes: 44:11

Yeah, and there's some awesome. So I mean, I have so much respect for anybody who can do field experiments. It's hard enough in the lab where I can, like you know, choose the animals and I have like 24 hour access to them. I cannot imagine you read some of these studies and you're like, oh, it took five years to get these animals to just happen, to go where you needed them.

Ikuma Adachi: 44:28

It's so amazing, yeah.

Reggie Gazes: 44:30

So, and I think, like it's really cool to think about how these things will complement each other, because I think in the lab, right, the benefit there is the access to the animals, the benefit is the control that we can bring and the frequency with which we can do the cognitive research in the field. Of course, the benefit is they have a much more naturalistic environment. It's, you know, they don't have veterinarians taking care of them. You can look at fitness, right, which we really can't look at in the lab in any real way, and generally the behavioral work is, you know, much more extensive. So I think there's like these parts that both sides bring and I do hope that, like moving forward, there's a little more crosstalk, because I think, at least in primatology, there's always been this kind of distinction between, like, the lab folks and the field folks. Right, there's not always a ton of overlap, but I do think we're heading to a time when we should be doing more of that. Okay ready.

Andrew MacIntosh: 45:18

You just given me an invitation, so we stop recording. I want to talk to you.

Reggie Gazes: 45:21

Sounds good, maybe you Kuma knows where I'm going.

Ikuma Adachi: 45:23

Okay, we're going to go here.

Andrew MacIntosh: 45:28

This will probably be the first time I've ever done this on the primate cast, but I wonder if you're up for a little. We can call it a lightning round. It's not really a lightning round, but yesterday I asked you, kuma, to put me in touch with your four undergrads. Oh good, and they sent me a list of questions For me.

Reggie Gazes: 45:44

For you.

Andrew MacIntosh: 45:46

Oh, that's so fun. There's way too many for me To actually read them out now. You've already been fed a couple.

Reggie Gazes: 45:54

Did they prompt you with bunny?

Andrew MacIntosh: 45:56

They asked a bunny question they see the bunny.

Reggie Gazes: 45:58

Okay, that makes sense.

Andrew MacIntosh: 46:00

Yes, In case you're wondering what that, but they had a really great set of questions and so I thought maybe I could ask a couple of them and I'll just maybe randomly pick a few. That I thought we've already covered some of the topics, but okay, so let's kind of go through a few. The first one, which I find kind of interesting you've already talked about teaching and how it's really important to what you're doing at Bucknell. So what's your favorite course to teach at Bucknell?

Reggie Gazes: 46:29

Animal behavior.

Andrew MacIntosh: 46:31

Why animal behavior?

Reggie Gazes: 46:32

So it's the introductory course for our animal behavior major. The students take it in their first semester at Bucknell and it's just such a fun class to teach because it's a really broad class, so we cover cognition and we cover behavior from all levels right, proximate, ultimate and it's just a very interactive class so we do a lot of stuff. It's very data heavy, which I love, so we spend a lot of time looking at studies and the students like talking through them and since it's their first semester and it's their first chance to really get into it particularly the ones that, like animal behavior, gets so excited, and so it's just like a really enthusiastic group. I just absolutely love teaching that class.

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:12

My answer is the same I love my animal behavior.

Reggie Gazes: 47:14

Do you? Is it also like first year students, or is it more advanced?

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:17

It's more geared to work first and second. We even get some grad students in it, yeah, so that's awesome. It's a pretty mixed bag of domestic and international students and it's a lot of fun. I do it flipped, so they're looking at lectures outside and in the classroom we do problem sets.

Reggie Gazes: 47:32

So it's a lot of kind of working through animal behavior problems.

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:35

It's really fun, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, super great, and we get to take them to Arashiyama.

Reggie Gazes: 47:40

Okay, that's cooler than we think.

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:41

Well, we have our primates. You have your own primate labs. Yeah, it's true, we bring them to see the baboons.

Reggie Gazes: 47:44

So we do have that.

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:47

Okay, and then here's a really good one too, to follow that up have you found any similarities between training primates and teaching students?

Reggie Gazes: 47:54

Of course I mean that's like not that that makes students sound horrible, but it's that's not at all. I mean, like the processes of learning are the same, right? Like that's the whole point. So I do teach a learning course, which I also love to teach, and so much of that class is focused on the idea that, like, the basic principles of learning are the same whether you're trying to raise a baby, or you're trying to train your dog, or you're training a monkey, or you're just trying to make your roommate less annoying, right? And I think I think that that universality of learning processes is why they're interesting to study, right? So yes, is the answer to that question. Okay, tough one here.

Andrew MacIntosh: 48:37

So one of the we talked earlier about, you know whether you're teaching undergrads or grad students and the probability or possibility that they will or will not go into the academy, and I think one of the things that weighs on a lot of us, I think, as academics, especially as trainees in academia, as we feel a lot of pressure and you know that there's a huge epidemic of, you know, anxiety, depression among graduate students kind of worldwide, which is not a surprise and it's great that more and more people are open to talking about it. But one question we had from your undergrads was do you struggle with imposter syndrome? And that's something we've talked about on this podcast before.

Andrew MacIntosh: 49:15

And I think it's a nice opportunity to have you know established folks also talking about that and I wonder you know it's such a good question.

Reggie Gazes: 49:26

I don't know if I suffer from imposter syndrome, exactly because I think I don't know, like as a scientist. Part of it is that you know there's a lot of stuff you don't know and that's okay, right, so. So I'm not, like I don't feel like I'm an imposter. I feel like I'm a scientist who knows a lot about some very specific topics, and there's other stuff I don't know that much about and I'm always excited to learn more about it. So I think in some ways it's just like reframing the fact that, like you do not have to be the person in the room who knows everything no one is right.

Reggie Gazes: 49:59

It's just about like you know some things, some things, and being open to learning from everybody else around you. I don't know. I think that's just the way to approach science, and then you don't feel bad about yourself. You're just like, oh, this is a learning opportunity.

Andrew MacIntosh: 50:12

It's hard to kind of. I think maybe not everyone models that very well. You know as professionals in our area, and there's a premium on your intellect right. Or at least a perceived especially traditionally, and so I feel like that's one of the more sensitive parts of it is that we, a lot of that is out of the box.

Andrew MacIntosh: 50:32

So you know, you can meet people who are just out of the box, really incredible thinkers, and then you meet people who work really hard at it, but most of us are just you know, somewhere in kind of between and, as you said, I mean it's a good way to approach it that you understand what your limitations are and accept them, and then just the opportunities to grow that we have, which are maybe not seen in so many other fields, are really really great yeah.

Reggie Gazes: 50:55

I think you know I'm a big proponent of collaboration in science and part of why I'm, part of why I'm here right, because we can't all be experts in everything.

Reggie Gazes: 51:04

Right, like you can't have seven PhDs and be an expert in all the things that you do, and so it's so valuable to work with people who know more than you do on a particular topic, right, and then you're bringing different things to the table and, like, some of the coolest projects we've done have been just like these collaborations with people that are totally different fields or work with different species or whatever.

Reggie Gazes: 51:24

I'm sure you've had similar experiences, right, like you just get to ask really cool questions and answer them using everybody's expertise and bringing it to the table. And I think a lot of my students will probably say this, either to their benefit or not. A lot of the stuff I do in my classroom is collaborative work, because I just don't think science happens by yourself ever. You know science is a team sport and you really need a team of people to make it work, and so when we're thinking through animal behavior problems and animal behavior or designing experiments in my comparative cognition class, we're doing it in a group because they're really. I just don't think you can really ask great questions by yourself.

Andrew MacIntosh: 52:01

And maybe you could just ask you like do you see in Japan coming back to original conversation about, how science is done really differently. Do you feel, like in Japan too, that there's a shift in the way people see their roles as scientists here, or so maybe this is not something that's as discussed?

Ikuma Adachi: 52:19

Generally speaking. I mean, I completely agree with Reggie in the sense that you know, we cannot do everything by ourselves. We cannot be expertise in the old area, basically right. But here I think in Japan at least, it was more stressed on the point that you have to be expert in something. So it's like a flip side. From the beginning you don't say I should collaborate with everyone else, but instead you have to be a strong person in something. Then later on the same thing happened. Right, if you are strong in something, then you can be a collaborate with some other stuff. So in general we are also into more collaborative works and that's why we are here together. But previously the philosophy was, I think, they want to be someone in something. That's probably a little bit more stress in the Japanese culture, I think. And also there is a huge difference across how do you call it? Different field in science.

Ikuma Adachi: 53:25

But especially in primatology, I think. Like everyone in the previous year, I want to do everything by themselves in the beginning, but then, of course, now you have to have some strong point to be a good collaborator. So instead of having a good collaborator from the beginning, but just you, need to be a good collaborator.

Reggie Gazes: 53:43

Yeah, you have to bring something to the table and for that.

Ikuma Adachi: 53:45

yes, that's just a little bit different perception, but goal is, I guess, in the same thing.

Andrew MacIntosh: 53:54

Okay, really quick one. Which is worse, anthropomorphism or Anthropononyle?

Reggie Gazes: 53:59

Oh, that's such a hard question. I can't answer that. I guess anthropomorphism, anthropomorphism.

Andrew MacIntosh: 54:08

Probably yeah.

Reggie Gazes: 54:09

Yeah. Yeah, it's a complicated question. I'll just leave it there.

Ikuma Adachi: 54:13

Okay, I mean it's more like a fit to the critical thinking perception at least. Right yeah, have to start with a doubt. Is that really so? Yes, but which doesn't mean the other side is always good either, because sometimes, like taking them as your own representative, for example, then you can better understand sometimes why that behavior happened. If I wore you, I might think that way we need to test it, so we don't just believe it, we just need to test it.

Ikuma Adachi: 54:44

So I mean answer is intermediate always. Which is bad? It's just without any belief, without any doubt. Just believe that they are as we are, then that's probably the wrong or worse.

Reggie Gazes: 54:57

For me at least. That was a very good answer, I agree.

Andrew MacIntosh: 55:04

Do you have any funny stories of? I tried to do this last time with Ikuma and Sarah. They really have a good answer to any funny stories about. I did that with Tsumu and Tesla Monson as well. Any funny stories as grad student with Ikuma as a postdoc back in the Hampton days.

Reggie Gazes: 55:19

I think so. Is that horrible? I don't think I have any funny stories. I really can't think of any. It's a chance to embarrass each other no. I really don't have any. Nothing ridiculous I feel like happened. We were a pretty stand up lab and that's our story.

Ikuma Adachi: 55:34

we're sticking to it, okay fair enough, well, but I can still make one fun story.

Andrew MacIntosh: 55:40

Okay, here we go Well.

Ikuma Adachi: 55:41

It's not related to science, though, but people are not changing a lot. That I found out after I welcome her here. When we are in the lab in the Alanta together During the lunchtime, she always picked the bread and peanut butter on an almost everyday basis. Sometimes Apple added it, but she's the one who is always okay to just, you know, simplifying the lunch and then put more energy to the science or the class and those stuff. And now she's here in Japan. Every day she's doing the same lunch, and if you don't want to eat anything else then she says, ah, lunch is fine, ah, same.

Reggie Gazes: 56:26

Same, it's true. People don't change 20 years later.

Ikuma Adachi: 56:29

And sincerity towards those scientific approaches are always same in her too, like you know. Just really decent time of thinking about that. You still have a dinner. It has more big portions, nice, but for lunch just simplify it and then try to think about science more and more and more. Talking about students, talking about I was amazed in a good way and also give me some nostalgic memory. Ah, same, huh Same.

Andrew MacIntosh: 56:56

Well, along the same lines, same. So you seem to have an inordinate affinity for Bucknell University.

Reggie Gazes: 57:04

It does seem that way, doesn't it, and so I wonder if you can comment on like.

Andrew MacIntosh: 57:06

What was the process? You graduate from there with your undergrad and you end up now as faculty.

Reggie Gazes: 57:12

Yeah, that was not planned at all Not planned.

Reggie Gazes: 57:15

I mean, if you had told 20-year-old me that I'd be back in Lewisburg, pennsylvania, for my life, I would definitely not have believed you. But you know, I think when you know, when you're in grad school, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you want to do with your life, right, and you change your mind weekly and then you decide you're going to be a florist or whatever, right. But I think what I realized through my grad experiences was like I really I love research, I love being able to do research. I wanted to work with primates, I knew that.

Reggie Gazes: 57:41

But I really loved teaching, you know, and Rob was an amazing advisor but you know, watching him in his career, it was clear to me I didn't want that particular career where so much of the focus was on grant writing, so little of the focus was on teaching.

Reggie Gazes: 57:58

You know, teaching was a sort of like side thing you had to do, sort of. I don't mean to imply that Rob didn't like to do it, but just like that was sort of the perception there. And so when I started looking for jobs, I was looking for a place where I could work with primates and where I could teach, and there's not a lot of great options and Bucknell's wonderful, and I think the thing that's unique about Bucknell not unique, obviously, there's other schools like this we have what they call the teacher-scholar model right, which is this idea that, like, we are both teachers and we are scholars and the expectation is that you teach and that you have an active research program that engages your students, and that's not that common right. So usually there's a heavy push on teaching or a heavy push on scholarship, so it's really cool that we get to do both, and so that was really what drove me there and I've been happily there for nine years now nine years, I guess.

Andrew MacIntosh: 58:46

Yeah, and I don't know if this is. We can edit this out if it doesn't work, but you mentioned earlier that Peter's judge was retiring and that may be connected to the fact that Bucknell is hiring.

Reggie Gazes: 58:55

It is connected to that. Yes, so Peter's judge is retiring and I wonder if you want to talk about that and maybe we can help promote for you.

Andrew MacIntosh: 59:00

Yeah, totally.

Reggie Gazes: 59:01

Happy to yeah. So Peter is retiring at the end of this academic year, so spring of 2024. So we will be hiring this coming fall, fall of 23, for a new primate animal behavior person. But it's very open position. It's in fact an open rank search, so it doesn't have tenure, but we will consider people at any rank. The only requirement is that they work with the primates on campus. So we have a wonderful colony of primates and we want to bring someone else in who can work with those animals and work with our students and work within this sort of teacher-scholar model that we have.

Andrew MacIntosh: 59:37

And I think basically the last hour we spent talking gives a good impression of what life and work is like there at Bucknell University.

Reggie Gazes: 59:44

So we're really interested. Yeah, and you can reach out to me. I'm chairing the search committee, so drop me an email.

Andrew MacIntosh: 59:49

Okay. So as we kind of close out here before I ask you if there's anything we've missed, the one question I couldn't leave out from your students is what's it going to take for you to do karaoke with them?

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:00

Oh, there's no chance Sorry. Sorry, I tried.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:06

So is there anything else, Reggie, that maybe you want to circle back on or that we didn't really talk about you think is important from this conversation?

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:14

I don't think, so what do you think?

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:16

You did okay.

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:18

I think we're doing okay, okay.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:20

Well then, reggie Gazes, thanks so much for joining.

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:23

Oh, there's one thing.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:24

When I said your name. I just realized that in your email, I think, you have a link to the pronunciation of your name.

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:31

Yeah, that's a thing in the States now.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:33

I was pleasantly surprised by that. I'd never seen it before.

Reggie Gazes: 1:00:38

Yeah, it's becoming more common now. So that way, if you have a name that people mispronounce regularly or not, people don't really have a very good excuse for not just learning how to say your name properly. So it's been very helpful. People always grew up my last name. I know I screw up my students' names. When you just see them in print for the first time, you don't know how to say it, so it's awesome to have that resource.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:56

I like it. I mean it gives a sense of inclusion as well, because it just it really levels a playing field for folks who don't have the same background, same cultural understandings. I really like it. So perhaps on my email I should ask you to see that in the picture as well. Reggie Gazes, thanks so much for joining us on the primate cast.

Reggie Gazes: 1:01:13

Thanks for having me.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:01:14

You come, as always. Thanks for supporting.