Jenny Tung

Jenny Tung is an American evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist. She is the Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a visiting professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2024, she was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Tung co-directs the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, a long-term study of wild baboons in Kenya.

Personal life Tung's mother and father immigrated to the United States from Taiwan and moved to Maryland and then to Delaware where they had Tung and her older sister, Wenny. Tung's father was a chemical engineer for DuPont, an American chemical company, and her mother was a teacher prior to their coming to the United States. Upon starting her undergraduate career at Duke University, Tung studied biology with the intent to become a physician, but she discovered her passion lay more in evolutionary biology after a taking a course on forging social ideals during her first semester.

Education Tung earned a bachelor's degree in 2003 from Duke University. She remained at Duke for her graduate studies, obtaining a PhD in 2010. After a postdoc at the University of Chicago, she came back to Duke University to work as a professor in the field of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology. Tung founded the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2022.

Research Two yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus), the species from the study found in Amboseli. Her research is helping to provide a better understanding for how health, lifespans, and fitness are all affected by social and environmental stressors. Tung's research is focused on primates, but also extends to other social mammals. In a different study, she researched the same idea, but in more competitive environments such as wild meerkats.

Awards + Award name Year Institution Primate Genomics Initiative Graduate Student Fellowship 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation MacArthur Fellows Program The University of Chicago offered her the Chicago Fellows Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2010. She was nominated for the Duke Postdoctoral Mentoring Award in 2013 from Duke University. offered Tung the opportunity to become a Kavli Fellow in 2015. In 2016, Tung received the Sloan Research Fellowship in the field on Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology which promoted continuation of her research. Tung was awarded the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her with $625,000.