Meredith Francesca Small (born 20 November 1950) is a professor emerita of Anthropology at Cornell University and popular science author. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She has been widely published in academic journals, and her research is presented in her most popular books: Our Babies, Ourselves Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children, and What's Love Got to Do with It?. She spent many years studying both people and primate behavior. Her current area of interest is in the intersection of biology and culture, and how that has influenced parenting.
Small entered the field in the late 1970s working on captive macaques at the California Primate Center in Davis, California, where she received a Ph.D. in 1980 within biological anthropology. She trained as a primatologist and worked in the anthropological genetics laboratory of David Glenn Smith and spent one year in France studying the mating and mother-infant behavior of Barbary macaques. Meredith Small focused on four types of macaque monkeys, as she spent field-time observing them as our closest non-human primates. Notably, Small spent some time in Bali, Indonesia, working on crab-eating or long-tail macaques. In 1988 Small moved to Cornell University where she was a professor of anthropology until 2016, the first woman in the department to become a full professor. In 1995, she was named a Weiss Presidential Fellow, the highest teaching award at Cornell.
Small began writing extensively for the popular audience just before her move to Cornell, and by the 1990s, Small shifted into mainstream journalism, writing articles for such publications as Natural History, Discover magazine, Scientific American and New Scientist. She regards this work as a form of teaching.
In 2005, the American Anthropological Association awarded her an Anthropology in Media award for "the successful communication of anthropology to the general public through the media" and for her "broad and sustained public impact at local, national and international levels."
Her articles have twice been in included in The Best Science and Nature Writing series.
From 2007 until 2010 she wrote a weekly column called Human Nature for LiveScience.com and these can still be viewed online. In 2014, she published her first fiction book, the beginning of a series featuring detective Grace McCloud.
In 2016, Small retired from Cornell and moved to Philadelphia.
<small>8. About â Meredith F. Small meredithfsmall.com/about Retrieved March 31st, 2026</small>