When she was in graduate school, Jacqueline Lungmus went to Tanzania and Zambia, some of the coolest places she's been able to do field research. 

“The people there and the culture is wonderful, but it's really just — we were working in the national parks there and there's very little tourism infrastructure — so you're very alone and you're really out there,” Lungmus said. 

Lungmus said while there, they had a guide that took them through the national parks and carried a “very large weapon” to protect against elephants, lions and leopards. 

“You’re in your tent at night, and you're hearing the lions off in the distance roaring at each other, or hyenas like cackling,” Lungmus said. “... I hear there was one field season before my time, where they woke up the next morning and there were cat prints through the middle of camp.”

Lungmus said she hoped to do field research in western China during grad school as well, but she was unable to get permits approved. Instead, she visited and collected data at museums, which she used for her dissertation. 

“The last trip of graduate school I did was right before (the COVID-19 pandemic), and I was in Brazil, …,” Lungmus said. “We basically had to get out of Brazil, because we were like, ‘Oh, this seems like this is going sideways. We should try to get back to the US.’ And we did. And just a few days later, New York shut down.”

Lungmus also spends time studying specimens from South Africa in Cape Town every few years. Stateside, her research has taken her to Texas, Arizona, Montana and Colorado. 

See where Lungmus has been for research below: