Tamsin Woolley-Barker

‍Tamsin Woolley-Barker Founder and Principal, TEEM Innovation Group, Dean, Geoversity’s School of Biocultural Leadership in Panama

Tamsin is the author of TEEMING: How Superorganisms Work to Build Infinite Wealth in a Finite World, an Amazon Bestseller in Organizational Learning and Environmental Economics, as well as Ecology and Animal Behavior––testament to the lively ecotones biomimics inhabit.

Tamsin started as a biologist––studying plant form and function in California’s redwood-filled Santa Cruz mountains; backpacking the Hawaiian Islands; obsessing about sociobiology under legendary evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers; and working as a live-aboard marine mammal observer in the Bering Sea as the only woman on a crab boat with 25 fishermen. Her profits took her to the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands––where she immediately forgot her aversion to boats. She earned her doctorate in Biological Anthropology, working alternately in a genetics lab and a tent in the Ethiopian desert, obeying the whims of a motley assortment of hybridizing baboons. This was the longest running and most extensive genetic study of any wild primate for many years––a model for addressing questions around altruism and social cooperation, human speciation and gene introgression among our ancestors––and is still widely cited.