me or a predator, so I designed my project around their alarmcalling behavior,” she explains. “I knew this was the job for me and I had to find a job that would allow me to do this.” The next career progression in wildlife study allowed Uma to go big—really big. She became a conservation biologist at the Asian Elephant Conservation Center, working on conservation projects in south and southeast Asia. She worked on tracking elephants, assessing crop damage, even participating in necropsies to see how individual elephants died. Studying elephants is exciting, though. “It’s probably the most dangerous job I’ve ever had,” she says. “Elephants kill more people worldwide than lions or tigers.” During her time at the conservation center, an exchange student from the University of California, Davis arrived to study human-elephant interactions. Neil Pelkey, now an associate professor of environmental science at Juniata, and Uma found that human-human interactions were interesting as well. By 1994 the couple had married and Uma was ready to look for Ph.D. programs. “If you want more control over your work, you have to have a Ph.D.,” she advises. She applied and was accepted at UC-Davis, found a project to work on and found herself back in India studying bonnet macaques. She documented predator avoidance behavior, sleeping behavior, site choice for communities and macaque behavior in urban and rural areas. “I thought that I would continue to work in India, but the bureaucracy you have to go through to get permits for research became too much,” she says. “If you have only a set amount of time to research in a country and you spend most of your time sitting in an office, that’s not good.”
When Uma and Neil returned to the United States, Uma was able to get a job as chief deer research biologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in 2000. About a year later, Neil Pelkey was hired as an assistant professor at Juniata. The couple commuted long distance for a year or so, but the appearance of their son Taran, now 8, meant Uma had to come in from the outdoors in Connecticut and enter the classroom at Juniata. She’s been at the College since 2005. Originally she and Neil shared one faculty slot, but eventually both became full-time faculty. “It was a shock at first,” she admits. “I had never written a syllabus, or a curriculum or even graded assignments.” Although she came to the College as a deer specialist and still does work on that species, she’s now overseeing a long-term project on coyotes. In addition to research on the color differences in Pennsylvania coyotes, she also is using a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to analyze the presence of metals in the animals’ kidneys and livers. She also is collaborating with biologist Chris Grant to analyze mercury in brook trout. “I’ve never had a problem finding good students for our research team and finding faculty to collaborate with,” she says. “Even (Juniata historian and noted coyote enthusiast) Dave Hsiung, who loves coyotes, wanted to talk. I had to tell him the coyotes we work with are dead, which unfortunately ended the conversation.” That said, the conversation about working with Professor Ramakrishnan is attracting more and more students, giving the College yet another devotee of hands-on learning and giving Uma many more excuses to go outside. And that’s the inside scoop on an outdoors academic. >j<
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2014 Spring-Summer
Photo: J.D. Cavrich
After beginning her career as an outdoorbased researcher in India, Uma found the transition to classroom teaching thrilling, but also a bit intimidating. She had never written a syllabus or given anyone a grade. But these days she’s well-versed at both types of classrooms— indoor and outdoor.