Dr. Wessling received her B.S. in Animal Ecology and M.A. in Anthropology from Iowa State University in 2009 and 2011, respectively. She completed her dissertation on environmental constraints in savanna chimpanzees living at the edge of their biogeographical range within the IMPRS of Human Origins via the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Leipzig University in 2018. Her main research interests orbit around questions related to ecology, behavior, biogeography, and evolution. She studies these processes focusing on Pan species and is particularly interested in how Pan evolutionary patterns can inform us on similar processes during human evolution. Dr. Wessling joined the Surbeck Lab in June of 2019. Over the next few years she plans to study ecological and other drivers of the bonobo “syndrome” and to extend this work more broadly to questions surrounding Pan speciation.