The Road
Less Traveled
EDUCATION
PhD/MPhil/MSc Biology, Yale University
BA History, Middlebury College
Coursework, University of Maryland, College Park
Coursework, Montgomery College, Rockville, MD
Walt Whitman High School, Bethesda, MD
Western Junior High School, Bethesda, MD
Wood Acres Elementary School, Bethesda, MD
St Andrews School, East Hagbourne, Berkshire, UK
Randall Highlands Elementary School, Anacostia, Washington DC
Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church Nursery School, Washington DC
PROFESSIONAL
Publisher, Gorilla X Press
University Lecturer with Tenure, University of Cambridge
President, Apes Incorporated
Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Visiting Assistant Professor, Princeton University
Visiting Lecturer, Columbia University
Conservation Ecologist, Wildlife Conservation Society, Gabon
Postdoctoral Fellow, American Museum of Natural, Manhattan, NYC
Postdoctoral Fellow, Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NYC
The Road Less Traveled
BLUE ORIGIN
Peter was born in 1960 in Louisville, Kentucky. As a reporter for the Courier Journal, his father once covered an as yet unknown singer named Elvis Presley. The family soon moved to Washington, DC, where his father took a job as top aide to John Brademas, one of the chief architects of the Great Society legislation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The family initially lived on Capitol Hill but soon moved to the Anacostia neighborhood of southeast DC. There were still “Whites Only” signs at the local burger joint, the Mighty Mo on Pennsylvania Avenue. They lived in a beautiful little house with a sad history, originally occupied by the slave overseer at the local planation. Peter attended Randall Highlands Elementary until 1966, when the rising specter of interracial violence began to hit too close to home. The apartment building down the block burned to the ground a few months after the family decamped to England, where his father became the first Western European correspondent for Science Magazine.
Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.
Peter then spent two rapturous years living at Limetree Farm, another beautiful old house in East Hagbourne, a picture postcard village 25 minutes south of Oxford on the edge of the Berkshire downs. Pets Ducky and Drakey, a stream full of sticklebacks, and retired racehorse Bronzemaid pastured in the way back. What child could ask for more? The only down side was going from a failing urban school to a failing rural school. He had endless fun tramping around in his Wellies but Peter didn’t really learn to read.
ANTIFAmily
Peter’s animal obssession was consolidated by a three month visit to relatives in the rugged mountains of Greece’s Peleponnese. It was 1967 and the village still lacked indoor plumbing. But that was more than compensated by a daily dose of Americana the mule, Zoe the donkey, and Rick Rooster, not to mention goats, rabbits, and a super-intelligent pig who thought he was a Labrador retriever.
Only three months earlier, a military junta had deposed the democratically elected government. Can you imagine visiting the Acropolis with literally no other tourists there? Apparently, an intrepid young mother with three children in tow didn’t seem like a threat. Peter was only seven. But the heavily armed troops stationed on every corner made a lasting impression about what it’s like to live in a police state. So, did vigorous denunciation of the junta by his socialist relatives, who’d lived through an even more repressive Nazi occupation twenty years earlier.
Slacker in Training
The left leaning political stance persisted when the family moved back to Bethesda, an emphatically blue, inside the beltway suburb then packed with non-profit workers, journalists, diplomats, and deep state types of the kind that MAGA Nation loves to hate. Fond memories of the race riot that broke out in 1975 during Stevie Wonder’s free “Human Kindness Day” concert on the Mall or chanting “Killer Kissinger” after the Turkish invasion of Cypress. You can take the boy out of DC…
But the animal infatuation went dormant, supplanted by a growing obsession with sports: baseball, basketball, and, most seriously, soccer. Who wants to spend Saturday morning at a gifted math program full of geeks with thick glasses and slide rules (remember those?) when you could be outside playing soccer? And how many National Merit Semi-finalists at hyper-competitive Walt Whitman High School ever asked to be taken out of the advanced math track so they’d have more time to hang with their buddies? Hey, it was the seventies….
Frat Boy
Imagine the shock of going from a high school life full of late night political debates with the grandchildren of holocaust survivors to what then still had the scent of a finishing school for disciplined but intellectually blase children of country club Republicans from Greenwhich. To make matters worse, Ronald Reagan’s election ushered in the era of “Greed is Good”. And did I mention the six months of bitter cold? So, Peter withdrew into a circle of left leaning friends. He took a range of social science and humanities classes that didn’t require much more than reading a few books. And he funneled his energies into perfecting the art of beer, bong hits, and bromance. Not that one couldn’t have gotten a good education at Middlebury. Peter just didn’t try. He scraped through with six D’s and a C average, completing his final requirement (the pool test) two days before graduation. The one silver lining of there not being much to do in Middlebury is that Peter was introduced to hiking and backpacking, which were to play a central role in his later fieldwork in Africa.
Buffoon to Biologist
Peter liked the questions his History major and Philosophy minor asked about human societies. But he wanted a more rigorous approach to answering them. So, he spent four years post-college years intellectually retooling (and growing up). To make ends meet while taking basic math and science classes at Montgomery Community College then animal behavior classes at the University of Maryland, he worked landscaping and construction jobs. Six months of freeze-thaw cycles as a field assistant on a prairie dog study in South Dakota both confirmed that he wanted to do fieldwork and propelled him into the Ecology and Evolution PhD program at Yale University. The plan was to combine his early interests in animals and politics by studying animal social systems.
Math & Computer Geek
Although he started his graduate career as a field biologist studying cooperative breeding in birds, Peter’s growing interests in the dynamical underpinnings of social systems rapidly lead him into mathematical population ecology and statistical inference. Coursework in probability theory, differential equations, and dynamical systems replaced metaphysics and the California Loyalty Oath Controversy. For a first-year course in Tropical Ecology, he taught himself to program on a Mac SE: Woo Hoo! Eight megabytes of RAM and a twenty megabyte hard disk! In a Biology Department top heavy with geneticists, he also developed interests in population and evolutionary genetics. Thus, his PhD dissertation included research on both the way that bird colony size affects the transmission of ectoparasites and analyses of some dubious assumptions made by popular phylogenetic estimation algorithms.
Into Africa
After one of those seemingly endless PhD’s, Peter held post-doctoral appointments at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the American Museum of Natural History. A chance encounter with two WCS field researchers who wanted help analyzing gorilla survey data changed his life. In 1996, after a brief interlude doing humpback whale surveys in Madagascar, he set off to Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in Republic of Congo to develop new wildlife survey and monitoring methods. It only took one close encounter staring into the eyes of a wild gorilla to get him hooked. Twenty-five years later he still is…
Revolving Door
Peter has cycled back and forth several times between academia and applied conservation. His four years living in Gabon and working in Congo, Cameroon, and Central African Republic, were broken with a semester teaching at Columbia University and followed by three blissful years away from conservation politics as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University. In 2002, while analyzing survey data for a World Bank consultancy on National Park planning in Gabon, Peter found evidence that Ebola virus had caused a massive decline in the world gorilla population. Much of his subsequent academic work as a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (2004-2008) focused on the population ecology, evolutionary dynamics, and conservation impact of Ebola and other viruses on wild gorillas and chimpanzees. He took another three year conservation hiatus to focus on vaccine trials before starting his six years as a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (2011-2017).
Hands On
As the conservation situation of gorillas and other Central African wildlife has deteriorated, Peter’s focus has shifted from simply documenting problems to developing concrete solutions. He’s particularly focused on issues that have been neglected because of their controversial nature or technical complexity. This includes both being principal investigator on three vaccine trials as well as application of new technologies like radio tracking and drones to gorilla tourism. To learn more, go to the Conservation section of this website.
Novelist & Publisher
In 2017, Peter resigned from a tenured position at Cambridge to do something more meaningful than punching the status tickets of posh kids with middling intellects. He is now living happily in sunny Sonoma, renovating an old house and writing novels like My Name is Freedom in an effort to create new funding streams for gorilla conservation. Where else can you find a women-powered antifascist thriller starring a near-sighted teenage geek and her smarmy gorilla BFF?
Life is short. Don’t waste it.