Zuleyma Tang-Martínez
Zuleyma Tang-Martínez is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Earlier in her career she published under her former married name, Zuleyma Tang Halpin.
Early life and education
Tang-Martínez was born in Venezuela on March 9, 1945. She and her family lived in ethnically segregated camps that were operated by an American oil company. Her father was a company accountant, permitting Tang-Martínez to be among the very few Venezuelans to be raised and attend school in the American camps. In 1960, she was sent by her parents to attend a Catholic, all-girls, boarding high school in Tampa FL because the oil camp schools did not go beyond the 8th grade. She completed high school in 1963; the nuns at the high school convinced her to go to college as a pre-med student, despite the fact that her parents had planned only on her finishing high school – as she was the first in her family to complete a high school education. She received her bachelor's degree cum laude from Saint Louis University, graduating in 1967 with a degree in biology. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1970 and a PhD in 1974 in Zoology. Tang-Martínez was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. For her dissertation she developed the habituation-discrimination technique in order to study individual discrimination by odors in the Mongolian gerbil Meriones unguiculatus.Career
Tang-Martínez was appointed assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 1976, the institution where she spent the rest of her career. She was very active in professional societies, especially with the American Society of Zoologists where she was elected as chair of the Division of Animal Behavior. In the Animal Behavior Society, her primary scientific organization, she served as chair of the Animal Care Committee, the Latin American Affairs Committee, and the Diversity Committee. In 1991 she was elected to the 4-year presidential sequence, serving as ABS president from 1993 to 1994.She studied social behavior, communication, and kin recognition of animals, as well as various aspects of dispersal, particularly with regards to how social structure impacts the genetics of populations. In 1987 she co-edited Mammalian Dispersal Patterns: The Effects of Social Structure on Population Genetics with Diane Chepko-Sade. More recently, she has challenged the theory of Angus John Bateman and Robert Trivers that male fruit flies behave more promiscuously due to their ability to produce millions of small sperm, and that this explains universal differences between male and female sexual behavior. She has argued against the universal application of Bateman's principle particularly with regards to the stereotypes of male and female sexual behaviour in humans. Her research was discussed in Angela Saini's Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story. She described the relationship between sociobiology and feminism as 'complex and multidimensional'.
Tang-Martinez and her students studied a broad range of topics and species, including the social systems of rodents, as well as other mammals. Examples of her research include using habituation-discrimination to study the ability of voles and other mammals to detect individually-distinct odors.
Tang-Martinez became associate professor in 1982 and full professor in 1994. She was director of women's studies between 1989 and 1990, and interim chair of her biology department in 1990. She has been concerned about students as higher education becomes more corporate. In 1993 she became president of the Animal Behavior Society. During her term in the presidential sequence of ABS, she created the ethnic diversity fund, which supports scientists from underrepresented groups to attend academic conferences. She also founded the Latin American Affairs Committee and served as its first chair. Currently she is the Animal Behavior Society historian and serves as an ex-officio member on the executive committee of the society. In her duties as historian, she organized the first-ever symposium on the history of animal behavior, which was subsequently published as a special issue in the society journal, Animal Behaviour.
She retired in September 2011 and was made Founders Professor of Biology. In 2014 she edited the first volume of the series Animal Behavior: How and Why Animals Do The Things They Do. She remains part of a National Science Foundation proposal to develop the next generation of animal behavioural scientists.
Awards and honours
- 1995 Scientists of Color, University of California at Berkeley O'Neil Ray Collins Distinguished Minority Scientist
- 1995 St. Louis Educational Equity Coalition Educational Equity Award for Higher Education
- 2002 Alzheimer's Association of St. Louis, Volunteer of the Year Award for contributions to public policy
- 2006 Animal Behavior Society Exceptional Service Career Award
- 2009 Animal Behavior Society Quest Award
- 2011 Animal Behavior Society, elected a Fellow
- 2011 Hispanic Business magazine, selected as one of the top 100 most influential Hispanics in the US and one of the top 8 most influential academics
- 2022 Animal Behavior Society, Exemplar Award
- 2022 Inaugural speaker for Animal Behavior Society JEDI Plenary Lecture Series.