Elodie Freymann is a New York-born, Rhode Island-based scientist and storyteller. In 2019, she took a break from the film world, where she had worked as an art director, assistant producer, and freelance graphic designer, to begin an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She liked it so much that she stayed on for a Ph.D. Her research focused on how wild chimpanzees self-medicate with medicinal plants, bringing together her interests in primatology, botany, social anthropology, filmmaking, scientific illustration, and conservation. Over the course of nine months living in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, she worked with two communities of wild chimpanzees, following them each day, recording their behaviors, and learning as much as she could about the ecology of their habitats. She also conducted a series of ethnomedicinal interviews with traditional healers and collected plants for pharmacological testing. Along the way, with the help of a storytelling grant from The Explorers Club, she was able to document her research through filmmaking and scientific illustration.

Now, as a Voss postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, she is working on the first systematic study of non-human self-medication in the Central Peruvian Amazon, collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to explore new methods and multispecies approaches to studying the many wild medicine-makers with whom we share our planet.