Angela Dassow

Professor Angela Dassow received her B.S. degrees in wildlife ecology and entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. After spending several years as the head preparator and assistant curator of herpetology at a natural history museum, she joined Prof. Michael Coen’s lab and earned her M.S. in zoology in 2010 and Ph.D. in zoology in 2014. She joined the Carthage faculty in 2015.

Prof. Dassow’s research focuses on computational analyses of animal vocalizations, exploring correlates with human linguistic phenomena at the phonetic, morphological, and syntactic levels. This work has centered on understanding the vocal communication systems of wild and captive white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar); however, she has examined other species as well, ranging across a variety of taxa including cetaceans, bats, canids, and song birds. By combining aspects of ecology, linguistics, computer science, and information theory, we are able to gain new insights into the communicative abilities of white-handed gibbons and demonstrate previously unrecognized complexity and structure in their vocal communication system.