Monique Borgerhoff Mulder remembers exactly how she became interested in the mosaic that is human culture. As a child, she traveled frequently thanks to her father’s job at an airline company. The globetrotting nature of Borgerhoff Mulder’s youth set the stage for her career as an evolutionary anthropologist and for asking big “why” questions about our species.
“I was privileged in getting to visit a lot of places, which made me just interested in the diversity of human cultures,” said Borgerhoff Mulder, a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Although there were detours along the way to academia, including forays into consumer journalism, teaching and museum archaeology, Borgerhoff Mulder eventually began examining questions related to marriage and family structure, household economics, child health, gender, inequality, and resource management and conservation, among many other topics. Her research is and was predominantly based in East Africa.
In 1991, Borgerhoff Mulder joined the UC Davis faculty. She retired from the position in 2019. But the term “retirement,” as it is for many academics, is a misnomer when it comes to Borgerhoff Mulder. Her research and conservation work continues. Now based in the United Kingdom, she’s affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of Bristol and the Santa Fe Institute. In 2021, her continuing achievements in original research led to her election to the National Academy of Sciences.
And now, Borgerhoff Mulder has been recognized again with the 2026 Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which exemplifies tremendous contributions of emeriti to the continued excellence of the University of California system.
A commitment to resource management and conservation
The award selection committee noted that Borgerhoff Mulder’s “methodological rigor and interdisciplinary vision” have led to her securing several million dollars in research support from agencies including the National Science Foundation, the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the Global Challenges Research Fund.
“Her work also has substantial impact beyond academia,” the committee wrote. “Through organizations she co-founded and advises, such as Watu Simba na Mazingira and the Ngezi‑Vumawimbi Heritage Organization, she has advanced community driven conservation efforts in Tanzania and Zanzibar, strengthening local governance and supporting sustainable livelihoods.”
“I was extremely happy for in the little spiel that was written about me that there was reference to these organizations,” Borgerhoff Mulder said. “Although I still very much carry on doing my own academic work, I’ve increasingly managed to link it into community-based organization and activism in East Africa.”
Borgerhoff Mulder’s collaborations with community-based organizations grew out of her desire to give back to the people who welcomed her and her research into their villages. She’s organized efforts to help local communities control illegal killing of lions by poachers and to slow deforestation in communities with economies that can benefit from carbon credits. The work aims to not just preserve critically important natural resources but also to preserve the deep ties between biodiversity, local culture and economy.
“I wanted to work more directly with how people protect forests,” Borgerhoff Mulder said. “On Zanzibar’s northern island, we now work with citizen scientists and, unusually for anthropologists, closely with the government to try to help shape policy directions.”
The work also informs Borgerhoff Mulder’s research on the evolution of cooperation. How do two villages with individual interests determine an acceptable number of trees to cut down for a region? Who polices that? And what about the potential competitive dynamics between these two villages for a finite resource?
“We can model all these dynamics,” Borgerhoff Mulder said, explaining how she now collaborates closely with economists to identify predictions to test with empirical data on what villagers actually say and do.
A road trip that defined an academic career
Though Borgerhoff Mulder has been retired from UC Davis for over six years and lives across the Atlantic Ocean on the moors of Devon, she looks back on her nearly three decades on campus with great gratitude.
“I’m very lucky to have had most of my career at UC Davis,” she said. “I learned so much from the diversity of theoretical and conceptual perspectives of my colleagues.”
Those learnings, those collaborations and that Aggie experience might not have happened if it wasn’t for a cross-continental road trip from England to Tanzania. Undertaken with an evolutionary biologist who Borgerhoff Mulder was dating (now her husband), the 1979 road trip crossed the Sahara from north to south and then cut through tropical central Africa to Kenya and into Tanzania.
During the trip, Borgerhoff Mulder started considering ways she could apply evolutionary thinking — the models and theories that inform evolutionary biology research on things like population dynamics, individual behavior, and trait spread — to questions about human cultures and histories.
“I sat in the Serengeti, our final destination, and wrote letters to everybody in an early book on evolutionary anthropology that somebody had sent me and asked if I could do a Ph.D. with them,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I ended up doing a Ph.D. at Northwestern University with the editors of that book, and that got me onto the conventional academic ladder, albeit several years later than most people.”
“Unconventional career paths should be encouraged”, she added.
The field of anthropology gained a bright mind from that trip. Better late than never.
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