She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Texas at Austin and recently held postdoctoral positions in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at Stony Brook University. Tecot is a primatologist who studies hormonal and behavioral responses of lemurs in Madagascar. One of her main interests is looking at the effects of habitat disturbance and climate change on primate stress levels, reproduction, feeding strategies, and phenology. She will be continuing her collaborative fieldwork in Madagascar and is setting up a lab to conduct hormonal extraction and analysis in the School of Anthropology, where she will be a member of the biological anthropology faculty.