ehavioral ecologist Toni Rapone knows that natural selection is the law of the planet. But for the vibrant and down-to-earth MBA-cum-scientist, that knowledge comes from more than textbooks. Rapone, whose given name, Antoinette, honors her father Antonio, who died in World War II two months before she was born, says she believes the hardships faced by her immigrant family in Lowell, Massachusetts, "selected for qualities of stamina and determination."

Indeed, Rapone turned out to be fit and feisty enough not only to survive but to thrive. "What made it possible was the fact that my mother truly enjoyed me and that my father's Sicilian relatives gave me so much love," she says.

That encouragement - combined with her father's military benefits - enabled her to attend Bennington College, where she majored in psychology and philosophy. After graduation, Rapone became a computer programmer and then worked at a computer consulting firm in Boston. When the firm closed during the recession of the early 1970s, her boss steered her toward an MBA, and Rapone, ever fearless, landed at Harvard.

A twenty-year career in retailing followed, in which Rapone became a kind of pioneer. Working for Macy's and Fortunoff in the 1970s and 1980s, she helped usher in a new consumer trend: designer housewares. "I was going to Italy to import ceramics, China to import baskets, and India to import rugs. I saw myself as a kind of Marco Polo," she says exuberantly, "traveling the world, bringing back things people had never seen."

While on a purchasing jaunt in Africa, she discovered the Serengeti. "There were a million and a half wildebeest all traveling hundreds of miles to give birth in one place!" she recalls. Rapone soon began spending all of her vacations observing and taking photographs of wildlife in Africa and other continents, broadening her knowledge by studying scientific articles on her subjects. But the dissonance of spending summers in the open plains and the rest of the year in the jungles of New York slowly grew. "I remember taking my garbage to the compactor in my apartment building and thinking, 'I'm going to die if I don't get out of here,' " she says.

So in 1993, Rapone became a college freshman again, earning high honors studying wildlife biology at the University of Montana and then entering a Ph.D. program in the highly regarded Animal Behavior Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. She spent this past summer observing the development of vocal communication patterns in Patas monkeys on the African savanna.

"I want to know how the Patas have adapted their vocalizations to survive as a species," Rapone says with keen excitement. "It's fascinating to me how animals develop successful behaviors, because when you look at any animal group, you're looking at the survivors." The first field biologist to formally study communication in Patas monkeys, she is already making pathbreaking discoveries. But as to learning what it takes to make it as a human being, Toni Rapone can no doubt find plenty of answers simply by looking within.

by Marguerite Rigoglioso

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Charles W. Cassell	Alfred A. Checchi	Robert F. Diromualdo	Kenneth A. Goldman	Peter G. Harf	Nancy J. Karch	Antoinette J. Rapone	W. Mitt Romney