Zuleyma Tang-Martínez


Zuleyma Tang-Martínez is an Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Earlier in her career she published under her former married name, Zuleyma Tang Halpin.

Early life and education

Tang-Martínez was born in Venezuela. She and her family lived in ethnically segregated camps that were operated by an American oil company. Her father was the company accountant, permitting Tang-Martínez to be among the very few Venezuelans to be raised and attend school in the American camps. She received her bachelor's degree from Saint Louis University, graduating in 1967. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1970 and a PhD in 1974. Tang-Martínez was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. For her dissertation she developed the habituation-discrimination technique in order to study individual discrimination by odors in the Mongolian gerbil Meriones unguiculatus.

Career

Tang-Martínez was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 1976. She served on the Animal Behavior Society Committee on Animal Care between 1977 and 1985. She studied the social behaviour of animals and dispersal. Social structure impacts the genetics of populations and rates of evolution. In 1987 she wrote Mammalian Dispersal Patterns: The Effects of Social Structure on Population Genetics with Diane Chepko-Sade. She has challenged the theory of Angus John Bateman and Robert Trivers that male fruit flies behave more promiscuously due to their ability to produce millions of small sperm. She has argued how incorrect Bateman's principle is, addressing the stereotypes of male and female sexual behaviour. Her research was discussed in Angela Saini's. She described the relationship between sociobiology and feminism as 'complex and multidimensional'. She has studied the social systems of rodents and raccoons, finding significant geographical variation of characteristics in species.
She was made Associate Professor in 1982 and full Professor in 1994. She was Director of Women's Studies between 1989 and 1990. She is concerned about students as higher education becomes more corporate. In 1993 she was made President of the Animal Behavior Society. She created the ethnic diversity fund, which supports scientists from underrepresented groups to attend academic conferences. She served as Chair of the Latin American Affairs Committee of Animal Behavior Society. She remains at the Animal Behavior Society as their historian. She used habituation-discrimination to study the ability of voles to detect individually distinct odours.
She retired in September 2011 and was made Founders Professor of Biology. In 2014 she published Animal behavior : how and why animals do the things they do. She remains part of a National Science Foundation proposal to develop the next generation of animal behavioural scientists.

Awards and honours

Tang-Martínez married her partner Arlene Zarembka in Canada in 2005. In 2014 she campaigned for marriage equality as a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit demanding that the state of Missouri recognize her Canadian marriage. She is an advocate for Hispanics and women in science.