Georgina Montgomery

Professor and Historian of Biology Michigan State University

East Lansing MI

Georgina Montgomery's research focuses on the history of field science, particularly the development of field methods.

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Biography

Dr. Georgina M. Montgomery received her PhD in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Minnesota in 2005. After teaching for two years at Montana State University, she joined Lyman Briggs College (75% appointment) and History (25% appointment) in the fall of 2008. Her research focuses on the history of field science, particularly the development of field methods and sites within primatology and animal behavior studies. Primatology is an international science and therefore her research also engages with issues of race, gender and globalization. Montgomery is interested in supervising graduate students interested in pursuing these kind of research areas at Michigan State University.

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

History of Field Science

Primates and Animal Behavior

Accomplishments

Winner of the Excellence Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship by the Michigan State University Chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi

n/a

Nominated by LBC for MSU’s Inspiration Woman of the Year Award for Community Engagement,

2018 and 2019

Education

University of Minnesota

Ph.D,

History of Science and Technology

2005

Lancaster University

B.A.

History

Journal Articles

Characteristics that make trophy hunting of giant pandas inconceivable

Conservation Biology

2020

In November 1928, Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt led an expedition to China with the expressed purpose of being the first Westerners to kill the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). The expedition lasted 8 months and resulted in the brothers shooting a giant panda in the mountains of Sichuan Province. Given the concurrent attention in the popular press describing this celebrated expedition, the giant panda was poised to be trophy hunted much like other large mammals around the world. Today, however, the killing of giant pandas, even for the generation of conservation revenue, is unthinkable for reasons related to the species itself and the context, in time and space, in which the species was popularized in the West.

Team climate mediates the effect of diversity on environmental science team satisfaction and data sharing

PLoS ONE

2019

Scientific research—especially high-impact research—is increasingly being performed in teams that are interdisciplinary and demographically diverse. Nevertheless, very little research has investigated how the climate on these diverse science teams affects data sharing or the experiences of their members. To address these gaps, we conducted a quantitative study of 266 scientists from 105 NSF-funded interdisciplinary environmental science teams. We examined how team climate mediates the associations between team diversity and three outcomes: satisfaction with the team, satisfaction with authorship practices, and perceptions of the frequency of data sharing.

Missing the Mark: A New Form of Honorary Authorship Motivated by Desires for Inclusion

Innovative Higher Education

2018

As scientific teams in academia have become increasingly large, interdisciplinary, and diverse, more attention has been paid to honorary authorship (i.e., giving authorship to those not making a significant contribution). Our study examined whether honorary authorship occurs because of the desire to include all or many team members. Interviews with project principal investigators (n = 6) and early-career project members (n = 6) from 6 interdisciplinary environmental science research teams revealed that principal investigators frequently employed inclusion-motivated honorary authorship but that this practice had some negative impacts on early-career team members with less power and status, thereby undermining true inclusion of those from underrepresented groups. We believe our findings are of import not only for environmental scientists, but also for scholars who are interested in issues of authorship decision-making regardless of disciplinary affiliation.