1. people
Photo of Ronnie Bailey-Steinitz

Ronnie Bailey-Steinitz, MS

EEMB/Anthropology
Email:
rsteinitz@ucsb.edu
Website:
The Roaming Ecologist

Education

  • Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, B.S.,UC San Diego, 2013
  • Biology, M.S., University of California - San Diego, 2015
  • Anthropology, Ph.D., University of California - Santa Barbara, In Process

Bio

Ronnie received her B.S. degree in Ecology, Animal Behavior, and Evolution from the University of California, San Diego in 2013. As an undergraduate, she conducted independent research in Dr. Carolyn Kurle’s feeding ecology laboratory in collaboration with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, analyzing diet-tissue stable isotope discrimination for multiple tissues from terrestrial reptiles. What started as a small, local project turned into a larger one; after graduation, Ronnie was invited to continue research at the Kurle Lab, and to pursue an M.S. degree while expanding her research to studying competition in two endangered species of rock iguanas in the Caribbean, building upon her undergraduate accomplishments. She earned her M.S. in 2015 and published a peer-reviewed paper from the data she collected as an undergrad. While at UCSD, Ronnie served as a Teaching Assistant for many ecology and evolution courses and received a Teaching Award from the Division of Biological Sciences.

After graduation, Ronnie took some time off to teach Human Anatomy at Moorpark College in Ventura County, and to direct a research project in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), studying bobcat prey preference in Southern California.

Since she joined the Ph.D. program in 2017, Ronnie has been studying primate feeding ecology and energetics in Dr. Michelle Brown’s laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, and she is interested in the effect of feeding competition on small-bodied primates. Her dissertation research requires both laboratory work and extensive sampling in the field, so Ronnie spends several months a year in a remote field station in the equatorial rain forests of Uganda. Back home, she uses the samples collected in the field to extract metabolic hormones and other biomarkers, indicators of muscles and energy gain, food stress (starvation), and thermoregulatory stress. Ronnie employs ecology field and lab methods, GIS and spatial analysis, and data science to execute her dissertation research.

Ronnie mentors several undergraduate student researchers on campus and in the field, and has served as a TA for both intro- and more advanced biological anthropology courses.

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

Campus Affiliates