Early life
Isbell grew up in Compton, California.[1] At school, she had the ambition to become a veterinarian, but was inspired to take an interest in primatology by Jane Goodall’s book In the Shadow of Man (1971).[2]
In Black, Brown, and White: Stories Straight Outta Compton, written with two friends from different ethnic backgrounds, Isbell has written about their lives in Compton during the 1960s and early 1970s, the era of the civil rights movement, the Watts riots, and black power. They describe how Compton changed from a mostly white community to a mostly black one that was known as "the Murder Capital of the United States."[1] The title refers to Straight Outta Compton, an album by N.W.A.
As an undergraduate at the University of Redlands, Isbell worked with ungulates, including bongos and desert bighorn sheep,[2] and graduated BA in ethology from Johnston College of the University in 1976.[3]
Isbell’s focus on primates came after moving to Davis, California, when she volunteered to work on a year-long behavioral project with captive bonnet macaques.[2] She spent two years in the field at Tom Struhsaker's study site in Uganda before entering graduate school at UC Davis, planning a dissertation on the behavior and ecology of the red colobus monkey, but took the opportunity instead to study vervet monkeys. After fieldwork in the Amboseli National Park, Kenya, she received a PhD from UC Davis in 1990,[3] with a dissertation on "Influences of Predation and Resource Competition on the Social System of Vervet Monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) in Amboseli National Park, Kenya" supervised by Peter Rodman.[2]
