DIRECTORS AND STAFF

Director, Co-Founder & Co-Director of Tuanan Research: Dr. Erin Vogel is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University. She has been studying primates since 1999 and started her research on orangutans at Tuanan in 2005. Her research at Tuanan primarily focuses on the relationships between diet, health, and physiology in orangutans. She is also interested in patterns of fruiting and tree growth in peat swamp habitats. Vogel supervises student research at Tuanan.
Erin’s Website

Co-Director of Tuanan Research: Dr. Sri Suci Utami Atmoko received her PhD in socio-ecology from the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2000. Sri Suci has investigated a number of socio-ecological questions in orangutans and gibbons for various sites in Sumatra and Borneo. She is currently working as a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Faculty of Biology at the Universitas Nasional in Jakarta. She supervises student research at Tuanan.

Co-Director of Tuanan Research and Board Member: Dr. Tatang Mitra Setia received his Ph.D. in 2015 and is a Professor at Universitas Nasional Jakarta in the Faculty of Biology. He has been studying orangutans for over 20 years in both Sumatra and Borneo. His research focuses on male social relationships in wild orangutans and he supervises student research at Tuanan.

Fundraising and Communication: Dr. Andrea L. DiGiorgio is a lecturer at Princeton University. She is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and conservation biologist whose research focuses on the spaces where humans and non-human primates interact. Her primary research investigates how wild primates get required nutrients in an increasingly anthropogenic landscape, and specifically how female primates cope with disturbance and still reproduce. She is currently studying the impacts of near-annual forest fires in Borneo on wild orangutans.

Treasurer: Dr. Elizabeth Ballare received her Ph.D. from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research aims to better understand the physiological consequences of rehabilitation and release in endangered primates. Through field work, laboratory analyses, and international collaboration, her research examines, monitors, and compares protein balance, energetics, stress, and immune-responsiveness in wild, rehabilitated, and released Bornean orangutans.

IT Manager: Amy Li is a PhD student at Rutgers University in Human Evolutionary Sciences. She received a B.S. in Evolutionary Anthropology and IT from Rutgers in 2020 and an M.I. with a concentration in Data Science from Rutgers in 2021. Currently she is working on the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub(MACH) project in the household decision making team.