Mireya Mayor
American anthropologist and wildlife correspondent
Mireya Mayor (born 1973) is an American anthropologist, primatologist, and wildlife correspondent for National Geographic, part of a research expedition that discovered a new species of lemur, considered the world's smallest primate. She has co-written several scientific papers on lemur species, and has been referred to as the "female Indiana Jones." In 2026, Mayor received the inaugural Voice of Discovery Award from the non-profit WINGS Women of Discovery.
Early life and education
Mayor, born in 1973, grew up in Miami and was raised by her mother, grandmother, and aunt, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1965. Her mother, a nurse, would not allow her to join the Girl Scouts, saying it was too dangerous.
She studied at the University of Miami where she obtained her bachelor's degree in anthropology and philosophy, and for four years was a cheerleader for the NFL Miami Dolphins.
Mayor, a Fulbright Scholar and a National Science Foundation fellow, earned her PhD in anthropology from Stony Brook University in New York in 2008.
Career
In 1999, Mayor was hired as the first female wildlife correspondent for the National Geographic series Ultimate Explorer. Two episodes she hosted, "Girl Power" and "Into the Lost World", received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Science, Technology and Nature Programming.
On a 2001 expedition in Madagascar, she was part of a research group who described a new species of mouse lemur, Microcebus mittermeieri, or Mittermeier's mouse lemur, after Russell Mittermeier, the president of green group Conservation International and a renowned field primatologist. Mayor told NPR in a 2015 interview that following the discovery, she persuaded the prime minister of Madagascar to declare the mouse lemur's habitat a national park.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3316032. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 2026, 1965 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mireya Mayor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.