Patty Brennan

InstitutionsDoctoral advisorStephen Emlen
Paul ShermanOther academic advisorsRichard Prum
Tim Birkhead Websitehttp://www.pattybrennan.com/

Patricia "Patty" Brennan is a Colombian and American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She is a professor of biology at Mount Holyoke College,^[1] and her research focuses on sexual selection, sexual conflict, and genital coevolution in vertebrates.^[2]

Brennan's work on the genital morphology of waterfowl, particularly her research on duck penises and her discovery of variations in duck vaginas,^[2] has received extensive press coverage in publications like The New York Times,^[3][4] The Guardian,^[5] National Geographic,^[6] and Scientific American.^[7] Her work on snake and dolphin clitorises has been featured in publications such as The Atlantic,^[8] Smithsonian Magazine,^[9] New Scientist,^[10] and The Washington Post.^[11] She is an advocate for basic science,^[12][13] as well as for further research into vertebrate vaginas.^[14][15][16]

Brennan was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She completed her Bachelor of Science in marine biology at the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1994.^[2] In 2005, she received her Doctor of Philosophy in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University, where she studied the reproductive biology of the great tinamou at the La Selva Biological Station.^[17] While conducting field research, she observed a corkscrew-shaped tinamou penis^[2] and wrote a post-doctoral project on bird genitalia after identifying a lack of research on the subject.^[18]

From 2005 to 2008, Brennan held a joint postdoctoral appointment at the University of Sheffield and Yale University, where she continued her research on the great tinamou^[19] and begin studying duck genitalia with Richard Prum and Tim Birkhead.^[2] After she received funding from the National Science Foundation to study duck penises, she was attacked by right-wing media for what was characterized as "wasteful" government spending.^[20] In response, she defended her work and the broader importance of basic research in the online magazine Slate^[12] and in the journal BioScience,^[13] and she began campaigning to support other scientists who dealt with similar attacks.^[21] She worked at Yale until 2009, after which she joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a research professor.^[22] Brennan joined the biological sciences faculty at Mount Holyoke College in 2015.^[23] In 2021, she received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study reproductive structures in snakes.^[24] In 2022, Brennan was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her contributions to biological sciences.^[25]

• In 2012, Brennan made an appearance in a PBS miniseries on sexual selection in the episode "What Males Will Do".^[26]
• In 2017, Brennan was featured in the XX Files video series by Science.^[27]