University lecturer in biological anthropology at Cambridge University,
William C. McGrew studies primate socio-ecology, the evolution of material culture, and the implications for human evolution of chimpanzee technology. He is a graduate with special distinction in zoology of the University of Oklahoma and earned a D.Phil. in psychology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, in 1970 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Stirling in 1990. He has been a post-doctoral fellow in psychology and a SSRC postdoctoral research associate in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, a visiting investigator at Delta Region Primate Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, and a research associate in psychology at Stanford University. In 1974, Dr. McGrew was appointed a lecturer in psychology at Stirling and, six years later, named a senior lecturer. Promoted to reader in 1989, he was appointed a professor of anthropology and zoology at Miami University in 1994, a post he held until assuming his present position at Cambridge in 2005. Dr. McGrew has been a visiting faculty member in the departments of anthropology and biology at the University of New Mexico, in the department of biology at Earlham College, the Wiepking Distinguished Professor at Miami University, a visiting professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales at the College de France, and a Russell Trust Senior Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Winner of the Prix Delwart for Human Ethology and Cultural Anthropology awarded by Delwart Foundation and Belgium’s Royal Academy of Sciences, Dr. McGrew also received an Outstanding Research Award from Indiana University. His work has been supported by the Leakey Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Hampton Fund at Miami University, the Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. He currently serves on the scientific advisory board of the International Primate Protection League and on the board of trustees of the International Society for Human Ethology. A member of the editorial boards of Primates, Pan Africa News, Human Evolution, and Folia Primatologica, he is the author more the 175 papers published in academic journals or in volumes of collected works. Dr. McGrew is the co-editor of three books, including (with L.F. Marchant and Toshi Nishida) Great Ape Societies (1996), which was awarded the W.W. Howell Book Prize in Biological Anthropology given by the American Anthropological Association, and the author of three others: An Ethological Study of Children’s Behavior (1972), Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human Evolution (1992), and, most recently, The Cultural Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.