Meet The Team

Gladness Alfred Mritha is a wildlife health professional currently pursuing a Master's degree in Public Health Pest Management at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Management from the College of Forestry, Wildlife and Tourism at the same institution.

With a strong foundation in wildlife management and a current focus on public health, Gladness specializes in zoonotic diseases and the complex interactions between human and wildlife populations. Her academic and professional interests align closely with conservation and public health initiatives, particularly in understanding and managing disease transmission at the human-wildlife interface. Gladness is now working as an intern in Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC), where she applies her knowledge to primate conservation while addressing critical public health challenges in wildlife conservation settings.

Biological anthropologists have presented several theories on primate locomotor evolution and reconstructions of hominin behavior and the selective pressures they faced in their environment. As a current postdoctoral researcher of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, I am particularly interested in understanding the influence of substrate dynamics in the savanna-mosaic habitats of the Issa Valley on wild chimpanzee locomotion to unravel evolutionary adaptations that might have led to bipedalism. Additionally, I will use state of the art methods and tools to record their locomotion in 3D.

My name is Benjamin Daymo and I recently graduated from ASU with bachelor degrees in Anthropology and History. I spent two years doing work for the palaeoecology lab at ASU, in the later year managing a team of students coding camera traps set up here at Issa Valley! I'm interested in human uniqueness and the conditions which brought us to where we are. While at Issa I'm taking on a hybrid research coordinator position where I'll pursue a project exploring primate responses to fire with the hopes of better understanding how enviornemets like Issa played a role in our evolution as a species.