About the Researchers
Dr. Megan Broadway is the founder of The Rough Tooth Project and its nonprofit fiscal sponsor, the Coalition for the Advancement of Scientific Research. Her research experience has focused on marine mammals, sea turtles, and dogs and has included everything from satellite tagging sea turtles to passive acoustic monitoring of dolphin vocalizations. Her recent work focused on how bottlenose dolphins use signature whistles when a new individual is introduced to an existing group. This included analysis of over 30 hours of audio recordings, 13 hours of behavioral observations, and 5000 whistles.
Dr. Heidi Lyn is an Associate Professor at the University of South Alabama. Her work includes data from many species including apes, dogs, and marine mammals with a focus on questions surrounding the evolution of communication, cognition, and language. She first began working with dolphins in 1991 at the Kewalo Basin Marine mammal laboratory in Honolulu continues to this day. She has over 20 publications, which have been cited over 600 times.
For over 25 years, Dr. Leala Sayigh's research has focused on the social behavior and communication of cetaceans (whales and dolphins). Her current projects focus on a wide range of species, including blue whales, fin whales, pilot whales, and bottlenose dolphins, and are both applied (e.g., looking at effects of anthropogenic noise on communication) and basic (e.g., looking at call structure and function). Given the challenges of studying species that spend most of their lives underwater, she is involved in research that utilizes new technologies, such as non-invasive tags, to study cetacean communication systems.
Dr. Lindsey Johnson is a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Cognition and Communication (C3PO) Lab at the University of South Alabama. Her current research focuses on identifying behavioral correlates of positive emotion in apes and dolphins. She graduated from Georgia State University in 2008 with a B.A. in both Psychology and Sociology and returned to school to receive a Ph.D. in Brain and Behavior Psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2021. She was honored to join the Rough Tooth Project in 2019 to collaborate on her dissertation project. Outside of her formal education, Dr. Johnson also has hands-on experience with dolphin research through internships/employment at the Dolphin Research Center and Dolphins Plus in the Florida Keys. Her broader research interests include dolphin communication, behavior, and cognition.
