Associate Professor, Anthropology
Vicky Oelze is an associate professor in the anthropology department, with a focus on biological anthropology, more specifically the study of non-human primates as well as archeological human and animal populations. In her Primate Ecology and Molecular Anthropology lab, she and her vibrant team of undergraduate and graduate students work on the behavioral ecology of African great apes and test new biomolecular tools to study present and past primate populations. They also engage in archeological science, specifically the archeology of the transatlantic salve trade, and more broadly historic and prehistoric archeology across the globe. The common theme holding this wide range of research topics together is the labs focus on stable and radiogenic isotope analysis.
Vicky joined UCSC in 2017, after spending almost 10 years at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary Anthropology in Germany for her PhD (Department of Human Evolution) and subsequent Postdoc (Department of Primatology). She received her masters in biological anthropology from Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. At UCSC, she teaches larger lecture classes on primatology, human evolution and archeological science, well as small hands-on lab classes on isotope analysis and chimpanzee behavior.