Dr. Boyer Ontl has been working in the field of primatology and wildlife conservation for 20 years. Her diverse background includes working as a primate keeper at the Houston Zoo, caring for orphaned chimpanzees at a West African sanctuary, researching wild chimpanzees in Senegal, and serving in faculty roles at Michigan Technological University and Ball State University. Her time in West Africa fueled her to pursue her graduate degrees and to establish the Falémé Chimpanzee Conservation project, an outreach program that promoted chimpanzee conservation through education, stakeholder collaboration, and ecological research. Her area of expertise focuses on the ecology and behavior of chimpanzees in southeastern Senegal using indirect and non-invasive methods. Her research has explored how chimpanzees adapt to the hot savanna environment by using caves as microrefugia to escape the heat, as well as studying the impacts of human activities, specifically small-scale gold mining, on chimpanzees and their behavior. Her research has been featured in the New York Times Science section and on Smithsonian.com. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and M.A. in Anthropology from Iowa State University, and a B.A. in Animal Behavior from Franklin and Marshall College.