Laura K Marsh

Biography

Dr. Marsh is a scientist, screenwriter, playwright, and author who believes science and fiction share the same core: storytelling. She is a member of both The Explorer’s Club and The Dramatist’s Guild. As a Los Alamos National Laboratory Scientist, she taught climate change education on behalf of the US Department of Energy in the North Slope of Alaska, Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Republic of Nauru, Australia, and the USA. Her work in PNG inspired her literary award winning novel SHATTERED JUNGLE - formerly SAV•AGE(S): https://lettersandscience.ucdavis.edu/news/tropical-biologist-wins-maurice-prize-world-war-ii-novel-set-new-guinea Dr. Marsh's 2014 monograph revising the taxonomy of the Pithecia genus (saki monkeys) is the largest revision for any Neotropical primate in more than half a century. She described 16 total saki monkey species, 5 of them new to science. One of the newly described species, Pithecia isabela, was named for the remarkable and courageous Isabel Godin, for whom she has written a feature-length film and musical libretto called ACROSS THE AMAZONS. Both properties are currently in development. The ACROSS THE AMAZONS screenplay was live performed in October 2016 at the Jean Cocteau Theater, Santa Fe, NM to a sold-out audience (https://acrosstheamazons.com). During the pandemic (2020-21), she wrote, directed, and produced a 12-minute monologue for Across The Amazons, where Isabel Godin is played by Edmi de Jesus. She is a Nichols award-winning screenwriter, author of six feature-length screenplays, a musical book, and two TV pilots. She wrote, produced, and edited a 6-minute teaser-trailer for a documentary on Avian Flu with Mark Medoff. She spent several years as an organizer for the Screenwriting Conference of Santa Fe; a screener and reviewer for the Santa Fe Film Festival; and was a multi-grant winning member of Women in Film, New Mexico. Dr. Marsh has published in professional journals on many aspects of science, conservation, and environmental education, including two edited books called Primates in Fragments. The second volume was listed as Springer's top 25% of science downloads (> 9000/year, over 83,000 total) for 2013-2021; books reviewers consider “essential.” At present, she is leading the effort for the IUCN on Global Guidelines for the Stewardship of Primates in Fragments with 140 colleagues in 35 countries. Dr. Marsh has worked, traveled, and lived in 32 countries. She specializes in tropical rainforest ecology studying everything from plants to monkeys to jaguars to people, and has worked internationally since the early 1980s. She is the co-founder and director of Global Conservation Institute (www.global-conservation.org), a 501c3 that strives to develop creative science solutions to global challenges for the conservation of nature and natural resources. In January-May 2017, she lead the "Houseboat Amazon" expedition to a remote watershed in Brazil to look for a missing a saki monkey that was collected for museums in the 1930s, but had not been seen alive since. The successful expedition team not only confirmed the formerly IUCN Data Deficient Pithecia vanzolinii in the wild, but studied it in its entire Amazonas range determining that it is now considered an IUCN Threatened species. The multinational team (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, USA) surveyed five rivers making new discoveries in a region that was poorly known by science. In addition to scientific publications and public presentations, the development of the documentary about the saki expedition in Brazil called HOUSEBOAT AMAZON: THE SEARCH FOR A MISSING MONKEY is in post-production (https://houseboatamazon.com). For more information: https://www.highercannibalism.com