Nora Bynum

Bio and Research:

Dr. Nora Bynum is Adjunct Associate Professor at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Her principal appointment is at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, where she is Director of the Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP, http://cbc.amnh.org/ncep.). NCEP is a collaborative project of the AMNH and numerous universities and conservation organizations in Bolivia, Laos, Madagascar, Mexico, Vietnam, the United States and other countries from around the world. The principal goal of NCEP is to produce and disseminate teaching resources for university faculty teaching topics relevant to biodiversity conservation. Dr. Bynum has extensive experience teaching conservation biology and environmental science at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and has specialized in the design and implementation of intensive, student-active, and field-based learning experiences. By training a primatologist and tropical ecologist, her doctoral work involved the study of hybrid macaques in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Current research is focused on patterns of phenological variation in tropical canopy trees and its implications, both for resource availability for mammalian consumers and local cycling of carbon through forest ecosystems. With collaborator Claire Hemmingway from the Missouri Botanical Garden, she is also exploring the conservation implications of resource seasonality in the context of global change. Dr. Bynum also retains a long standing interest in the ecology and conservation of Sulawesi, Indonesia.