Great Ape Trust prominently featured at Iowa Academy of Science meeting

Des Moines, Iowa – March 30, 2009 – Great Ape Trust scientists and students will be featured in four back-to-back presentations when the Iowa Academy of Science convenes its 121^st annual meeting April 17-18 at Des Moines University.

Presentations will be made by Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Karyl Swartz; Kristina Walkup, a researcher at Great Ape Trust who defended her dissertation earlier this month and expects to receive her Ph.D. from Iowa State University in May; researcher Caisie Pitman; and researcher Janni Pedersen. Pitman and Pedersen also are doctoral candidates at Iowa State who are also conducting research at Great Ape Trust.

“The Iowa Academy of Science’s interest in dedicating an entire afternoon to the science conducted at Great Ape Trust is an acknowledgement of the significance of the science and the impact it may have on young people considering careers in science,” said Jim Aipperspach, The Trust’s director of operations.

“We are pleased to have scientists from Great Ape Trust presenting their research,” said Craig Johnson, executive director of the Iowa Academy of Science, a nonprofit organization established in 1875 to promote scientific research, public understanding of science and recognition of excellence in these endeavors.

“It is a unique opportunity for Iowans to learn more about the great apes and the important research being conducted in their own back yard,” he said.

The Great Ape Trust presentations will be made April 18 after a general session featuring a keynote address by Dr. Jill Pruetz, an associate professor of anthropology at Iowa State University who has been studying a group of savanna chimpanzees in Senegal, Africa, for nearly a decade. Pruetz’s presentation, “Redefining Chimpanzees: How Savanna Chimpanzees Inform our Understanding of Human Evolution,” is free and open to the public. However, registration is required.

Those attending section meetings, in which Swartz, Walkup, Pitman and Pedersen will make their presentations, must be Iowa Academy of Science members.

Dr. E. Patrick Finnerty, a professor of physiology and pharmacology specializing in neuroscience at Des Moines University and a past president of the IAS, said Great Ape Trust’s scientific participation in the annual meeting is a signal the organization has matured “from the fertile imagination of founder Ted Townsend to actual nuts-and-bolts research in a short time frame.”

Given the relative size of Great Ape Trust to other institutions represented on the program, such as Iowa State University or University Iowa, “to see four presentations from Great Ape Trust demonstrates clearly the active involvement in scientific research going on there,” said Finnerty, who also is a member of Great Ape Trust’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

“Great Ape Trust is one more example of an institution in Iowa that is at the leading edge in some fashion of scientific discovery, research and knowledge,” Finnerty said. “We have folks at Iowa State University who are right up there in terms of technology, in astrophysics and the like; at the front edge of stuff in biomedical sciences at the University of Iowa; and people at DMU doing molecular biology research for cures for cancer – and right up there with them is Great Ape Trust.