Susan C. Alberts

About

Susan C. Alberts is the Robert F. Durden Distinguished Professor of Biology at Duke University, where she has held the position since 2015. Her research investigates the evolution of social behavior, particularly in mammals, with a focus on the social behavior, demography, life history, and behavioral endocrinology of wild primates. Her main study system is the baboon population in Amboseli, Kenya, which is one of the longest-running studies of wild primates in the world, ongoing since 1971. Alberts' work aims to understand the social structures and interactions that influence animal behavior and health, contributing to broader insights into primate and human social evolution.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Biology
• Genetics
• Demography
• Zoology
• Evolutionary biology
• Mathematics
• Environmental science
• Statistics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Social determinants of health and survival in humans and other animals

  Science · 2020 · 679 citations

  The social environment, both in early life and adulthood, is one of the strongest predictors of morbidity and mortality risk in humans. Evidence from long-term studies of other social mammals indicates that this relationship is similar across many species. In addition, experimental studies show that social interactions can causally alter animal physiology, disease risk, and life span itself. These findings highlight the importance of the social environment to health and mortality as well as Darw…

  DOI

• Gut microbiome heritability is nearly universal but environmentally contingent

  Science · 2021 · 268 citations

  Relatives have more similar gut microbiomes than nonrelatives, but the degree to which this similarity results from shared genotypes versus shared environments has been controversial. Here, we leveraged 16,234 gut microbiome profiles, collected over 14 years from 585 wild baboons, to reveal that host genetic effects on the gut microbiome are nearly universal. Controlling for diet, age, and socioecological variation, 97% of microbiome phenotypes were significantly heritable, including several rep…

  DOI

• High social status males experience accelerated epigenetic aging in wild baboons

  eLife · 2021 · 163 citations

  Aging, for virtually all life, is inescapable. However, within populations, biological aging rates vary. Understanding sources of variation in this process is central to understanding the biodemography of natural populations. We constructed a DNA methylation-based age predictor for an intensively studied wild baboon population in Kenya. Consistent with findings in humans, the resulting 'epigenetic clock' closely tracks chronological age, but individuals are predicted to be somewhat older or youn…

  DOI

• Effects of body size on estimation of mammalian area requirements

  Conservation Biology · 2020 · 97 citations

  Accurately quantifying species' area requirements is a prerequisite for effective area-based conservation. This typically involves collecting tracking data on species of interest and then conducting home-range analyses. Problematically, autocorrelation in tracking data can result in space needs being severely underestimated. Based on the previous work, we hypothesized the magnitude of underestimation varies with body mass, a relationship that could have serious conservation implications. To eval…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The long lives of primates and the ‘invariant rate of ageing’ hypothesis

  Nature Communications · 2021 · 89 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Is it possible to slow the rate of ageing, or do biological constraints limit its plasticity? We test the 'invariant rate of ageing' hypothesis, which posits that the rate of ageing is relatively fixed within species, with a collection of 39 human and nonhuman primate datasets across seven genera. We first recapitulate, in nonhuman primates, the highly regular relationship between life expectancy and lifespan equality seen in humans. We next demonstrate that variation in the rate of ageing withi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03AG045459

  NIH · $79k · 2015

• Research Network on Animal Models to Understand Social Dimensions of Aging

  NIH · $2.6M · 2020–2030

• Administrative Core

  NIH · $20.8M · 2023

Frequent coauthors

• Jeanne Altmann

  682 shared

• Jenny Tung

  Duke University

  301 shared

• Elizabeth A. Archie

  University of Notre Dame

  283 shared

• Laurence R. Gesquiere

  89 shared

• Mercy Y. Akinyi

  National Museums of Kenya

  75 shared

• Fernando A. Campos

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  58 shared

• Marie J. E. Charpentier

  Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier

  47 shared

• Emmanuel O. Wango

  University of Nairobi

  44 shared

Education

• PhD, Ecology and Evolution

  University of Chicago

  1992

Awards & honors

• Bass Fellow (2012 - Present)
• International Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2025)

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Xinnian Dongh-103
• Rytas J. Vilgalysh-93
• Gregory Allan Wrayh-70