Jacinta Beehner is an assistant professor in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She received her B.S. in Biology from Boston College in 1994, followed by an M.A. (1998) and a Ph.D. (2003) in Biological Anthropology from Washington University. For her dissertation, she studied the reproductive behavior and success of hybrid female baboons in Ethiopia. She then was a Research Associate with Drs. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney at the University of Pennsylvania studying the hormones and behavior of chacma baboons in Botswana.

Next, she moved on to a postdoc position with Dr. Jeanne Altmann at Princeton University working on the reproductive endocrinology of female yellow baboons. Since 2005, she has been studying sexual selection, reproductive strategies, and social behavior in geladas living in the Simien Mountains National Park of Ethiopia. She co-directs (with Thore Bergman) the University of Michigan Gelada Research Project. She also is the director of the Core Assay Facility in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

In her spare time, Jacinta likes to dream up ways of getting her two children into the field.