Jack Harris established the Primatology, Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Field School, which conducted its first session in 2007. This program, along with the Swahili Studies and Coastal Peoples of Kenya Field School and Koobi Fora Field School, is jointly coordinated by Rutgers and the Kenya National Museums, with former and current Rutgers graduate students, including several Kenyans, serving as instructors and co-coordinators with Prof. Harris.

All of the field schools are open to undergraduate students from around the world, a significant proportion of whom are from Rutgers.

Robert Scott was hired as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers and became a member of CHES in 2007. Prof. Scott is a physical anthropologist and paleoecologist who received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 2004, and thereafter held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Arkansas before coming to Rutgers. He has conducted important work on the paleoecology of Miocene hominoids, the ancestors of the human lineage. He has also co-developed a new method for reconstructing early hominin diets based on microscopic wear on teeth, as described in Nature in 2005.