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Nadine Adrianna Sugianto’s career path: from veterinary medicine, to badgers in Oxford, and now orangutans

Dr. Nadine Adrianna Sugianto completed her DPhil with WildCRU in 2018 on reproductive biology of the European badger (Meles meles). We are delighted to congratulate her at the beginning of her post doctoral career, working on The Orangutan Enclosure Design Tool (EDT), for Kalimantan-Indonesia, as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Locomotor Ecology and Biomechanics Lab, School of Bioscience, University of Birmingham. Her research focus is to test the effectiveness of the EDT in preparing sanctuary orangutans for release and quantify post-release behavioural profiles to produce a refined pre-release assessment and post-release monitoring tool. She is also further exploring the aspects of orangutan locomotion, nest building, social learning, and neophobia/exploratory behaviour. The Enclosure Design Tool (EDT) is an interactive computer interface that translates research on wild great apes into a format that sanctuaries and rehabilitation centres can use to encourage wild-type behaviours and enhance quality of life in their great apes. The tool compares behavioural ecology data from great apes in captive settings to data on wild apes and makes recommendations for how to modify enclosures to elicit missing or under-represented wild-type behaviours, better preparing them to thrive in the wild post-release.