Team Bio

Oakland Zoo and the SSUPER Lab have partnered in student-led research on animal care and welfare at Oakland Zoo since 2014. This partnership has provided research experience to over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students at Sonoma State, and informed and advanced the care of multiple species at Oakland Zoo. The central research focus for this partnership is ‘removing the caretaker from the animal engagement by creating dynamic environments’

Darren Minier

Darren Minier has built and managed animal care, behavior management, and welfare programs with a large range of taxa - both captive and free-ranging - in zoos, marine parks, sanctuaries, animal-assisted therapy, and biomedical research facilities both nationally and abroad. He received a Master’s degree from George Mason University and AZA's Zoo and Aquarium Leadership Program, B.S. from the University of California, Davis in Wildlife and Fish Conservation Biology focusing in Behavioral Ecology, and three degrees from the Exotic Animal Training and Management Program at Moorpark College. Mr. Minier is the Assistant Director of Animal Care, Conservation, and Research at the Oakland Zoo, which includes overseeing the Welfare Research program. He is currently working with sanctuaries, zoos, and policy activists to form the Bear Education and Advocacy Resource (BEAR) Alliance, and consults nationwide on the care and welfare of bears in need. He is a board member for the California Wolf Center, and sits on the International Primatological Society's Captive Care Committee, the Animal Behavior Society's Animal Care Committee, and is an animal management and well-being reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Journal of Animal Welfare, and Zoo Biology.

Karin E. Jaffe

Karin Jaffe received her BA in anthropology from UC San Diego and her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Davis. She has been studying captive and wild primates for over 25 years, including sub-specific sociality differences in orangutans at the San Diego Zoo, behavior of mona monkeys on the island of Grenada, and vervet and patas monkey anti-predator behavior in Laikipia, Kenya. She is Professor of Anthropology at Sonoma State University, Research Affiliate at Oakland Zoo, and Director of the Sonoma State University Primate Ethology Research Lab

Yasmeen Ghavamian

Yasmeen Ghavamian studied at Sonoma State University (SSU), receiving her B.A. in Biology in May 2018 and M.S. in Biology in May 2020. Ms. Ghavamian has several years of experience working with captive animals, including volunteering at the Animal Resource Center at San Francisco Zoo where she worked hands-on with a variety of mammals, reptiles and birds. As an undergraduate at SSU, Ms. Ghavamian began studying the Malayan sun bears at Oakland Zoo when she joined a previous research project in the SSU Primate Ethology Research Lab. As a master's student, she expanded on her undergraduate work and continued to collaborate with Oakland Zoo by designing a study that implemented complex feeding enrichment devices for the Malayan sun bears. This study was entirely supported by a crowdfunding campaign through Experiment.com/sunbears and is now published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science. She is currently working on her PhD in Animal Biology at University of California, Davis, as a member of the Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab.

Andrea Dougall

Andrea Dougall began her career in animal care in her early teens as a volunteer at the Animal Resource Center at the San Francisco Zoo. After receiving a BS in Biological Sciences from the University of California Santa Barbara, she began working towards getting into the profession of animal care where she has now worked for 15 years, 13 of which have been at Oakland Zoo. In addition to her experience at Oakland Zoo, she has been an animal care volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, the largest marine mammal hospital in the world, for over 13 years. Additionally she spent several years volunteering in the field with the River Otter Ecology Project working to get the first real glimpse at the North American river otter population in the San Francisco Bay Area in decades. She currently manages a diverse section of the zoo that includes primates, carnivores (including the sun bears), marsupials, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.