Vanessa Woods

Vanessa Woods

Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at Duke University with her fellow researcher and husband Brian Hare. She works in sanctuaries for orphans, instead of in biomedical laboratories and basically plays games with them all day to find out how they think.

Vanessa, when she’s not waving red porcupines at baby bonobos and trying to outsmart chimpanzees, is a journalist/blogger and writes frequently about her research experiences on the blog Bonobo Handshake (bonobohandshake.blogspot.com).

Vanessa published her first article about Baluku, a chimp who used to pee on her bed. Since then, Vanessa has become an internationally published author and journalist and is the main Australian/New Zealand feature writer for the Discovery Channel. She has written for various publications including BBC Wildlife, New Scientist, and Travel Africa. In 2003, Vanessa won the Australasian Science award for journalism.

Vanessa is also the author of four books -- three children’s books; It’s True, There Are Bugs in Your Bed (2004), It’s True, Space Turns You into Spaghetti (2005), and It’s True, Pirates Ate Rats. In 2007, her children’s book on space was named an Acclaimed Book by the UK Royal Society and short listed for the Royal Society’s Junior Science Book Prize.

Her latest book, It’s Every Monkey for Themselves: A True Story of Sex, Love and Lies in the Jungle is aimed at adult audience. For Vanessa, science and writing are closely linked. After a year studying the behavioral ecology of monkeys in Central America, it occurred to her that very few people outside the scientific community knew what it was like to chase monkeys for 14 hours a day, live in a compression chamber with eight other people for a year, or watch as you and the people around you morph into monkeys

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