Pam Noble, MBA
Projects Manager
NIH/NIMH/IRP Primate Core
Poolesville, MD

I was an undergraduate at University of Arizona, studying Anthropology. I had a husband and two young children when I got serious about college, so I was what is known as a “nontrad” student. My passion, I discovered as a student there, was studying primates – chimpanzees, monkeys, etc. I was lucky enough to discover an office of the Jane Goodall Institute was located upstairs from the Starbucks on University Ave, and I worked there for three years, getting a chance to travel to zoos around the country and meet Dr. Goodall a couple of times.

My anthropology professor also introduced me to her old friend Dieter Steklis, who worked for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International – and I ended up getting to intern there for a couple of years as well, developing a multimedia database for all of their photos, notes and audio recordings from the mountain gorilla habitat in Rwanda.

Somewhere along the line I added on Psychology as a second major, ended up graduating, and went off to graduate school in Atlanta at Georgia Tech in the Experimental Psychology program. At that time the program was linked to the zoo, and I got to do my own research there with the orangutans, gorillas, and lemurs. (And komodo dragons and pandas, even though they’re not primates.)

I spent a year at Georgia Tech, then worked with chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University that first summer. It was then I realized I couldn’t afford to be a grad student with two kids to feed, so quit and took a full time job at Yerkes working for Dr. Jim Winslow doing behavioral research with rhesus monkeys. That was the fall of 2000. I later got my MBA online through the University of Phoenix.

In Dr. Winslow’s lab we have done a lot of research about mood and anxiety disorders, publishing numerous papers that help shed light on the sort of social deficits and anxieties that children coming out of abusive or neglectful situations experience (Romanian orphanages being a primary source of comparison data), thus facilitating the development of therapies and drugs that can help rehabilitate those children.

In 2003 we moved our lab to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, working for the Institute of Mental Health. We continue our work with monkeys in the mood and anxiety research field, collaborating with many renowned scientists and churning out research papers.

My job has grown from originally managing one project back in Atlanta to running the entire lab here at NIH. I have presented papers and posters at scientific conferences, manage the daily activities of our monkeys, employees and collaborative staff, have full control of our quarter million dollar budget, and will soon be flown to Australia to help train the staff of a new primate facility there, thereby hoping to develop a long-term relationship between the two institutes for collaborations.

If there are any students at UA today who are interested in getting into clinical or preclinical research, or are interested in animal behavior, the NIH has a fantastic internship program. We take three or four summer interns in our lab each year (which pays fairly well), and we let them learn whatever they want to learn about, from getting in with the monkeys to train and test them, learning their behaviors to quantify our observations into interpretable data, to performing “bench” work in the lab, running assays on blood samples for hormone profiles. Other labs at the NIH also offer tons of different types of opportunities as well. If someone is interested in what we do in my lab, feel free to contact me! I can’t guarantee openings in any other labs, but more information about the various internship opportunities across NIH can be found at http://www.training.nih.gov/.

DIRP Non-Human Primate Core - Current Resarch