For Giuliana Centofanti ’16, studying our closest living relatives offers a window into our own human biology and social behavior.

Deep in the dense forests of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, Giuliana Centofanti ’16 tracks wild chimpanzees to answer a fundamental question about survival: how do early life adversities and social relationships shape long-term sociality and health? As a doctoral researcher at Emory University, she spends her days hiking arduous trails in the heat to collect urine samples and record minute-by-minute social dynamics such as grooming, play, and hierarchy navigation. The evidence she collects helps to measure long-term social and physiological stress on orphaned chimpanzees. 

Why chimps? “They’re one of our closest living relatives,” Giuliana explains. “So if you see the same kind of stress response in them that you’d expect in humans, it’s a clue that the response is biological and not just cultural or learned, which is definitely something I think we’d want to understand in humans.”

Her journey into primatology is unique. As an undergraduate at George Washington University, Giuliana focused on clinical psychology and later added a major in biological anthropology, with an interest in innate human responses to trauma and stress. Driven by that curiosity, she transitioned into primate research, spending a full year in Côte d’Ivoire with the Taï Chimpanzee Project before beginning her doctoral degree at Emory University and launching her current field research in Tanzania, where she will be based through next July.

Giuliana got her start right here at Wheeler, where, as luck would have it, she had the chance to hear the late, great Dr. Jane Goodall speak to the Wheeler community when she was a senior. At the time, Giuliana did not know the path her academic journey would take. Common to the Wheeler experience, Giuliana was encouraged to explore wide-ranging interests across disciplines, such as writing, music, and psychology, supported by faculty like her 8th-grade advisor and English Teacher Jodi von Reinhart P’98, P’03 and her 9th-grade advisor and Performing Arts Chair Kristin Sprague P’09, P’16. 

When Giuliana shifted from performing in the Upper School Jazz band into more individualized creative pursuits, the Aerie Program provided her with a one-on-one course on songwriting. “I would say that’s one of the big things about Wheeler,” she adds. “You could have an interest and figure out a way to get to it.” Following her Aerie class, she assembled a songwriting club and later returned to Wheeler to teach Aerie herself, leading a primatology course for high school students and sharing her love of creative expression through a songwriting class for elementary students.

Giuliana’s advice to students is to be open to more than one path: “I was always writing, and I wanted to find an avenue to keep it in my life. By senior year, I knew I was headed for clinical psych, but I always pictured writing running alongside the research, and creative writing remained something I do for myself rather than for work. I think that’s a good mentality for students: keep an open mind and leave room for more than one thing.

Whether she is analyzing chimpanzee social structures in Africa or expressing herself through creative writing, songwriting, and playing music, Giuliana’s journey reflects the fullness of a Wheeler education and the human experience.