Public scholar: Brogan Stewart
How can Japanese macaque behaviour inform our understanding of whether a monkey is stressed by its physical circumstance — e.g., physical impairment, injury — and environmental context — e.g., captive, free-ranging or wild?
Brogan Stewart is a doctoral candidate in environmental science who studies animal behaviour and environmental variability. She holds a Bachelor of Science Honours with Distinction in environment science, where her research focused on the impacts of climate change on nonhuman primate habitats. She was then encouraged to go directly into her doctoral degree. She is a founding member of the Climate Emergency Committee, and an active member of the Leadership in Environmental and Digital innovation for Sustainability program, Zooentropy, the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, and the Concordia representative to the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science. Brogan is the 2022-2023 Concordia International Scholar.
Brogan’s research focuses on nonhuman primate species, how they interact with their environment and how their environment affects them. She focuses on Japanese macaques as a model to investigate the adaptive capacity of animals with physical impairments and disability. She also uses fractal analysis and other modelling tools to compare the environments of wild, free-ranging, and captive macaques, to see if we can detect subtle differences in their behaviour as indicators of stress when their habitats become less complex. Her doctoral research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies and Concordia University.