Dena Clink's principal scientific interests are in the behavioral ecology and evolution of acoustic signals. Her research focuses on primate acoustic communication from a comparative and evolutionary perspective. She aims to answer questions related to the evolution and maintenance of vocal diversity in primates using innovative bioacoustics techniques, with an emphasis on testing new technology and drawing from diverse fields such as human speech recognition, machine learning and signal processing. She is particularly interested in the evolutionary mechanisms that shape variation in primate vocal communication systems, and understanding the function of primate vocalizations, as this can help us understand the evolution of communication in our own species.

Dr. Clink was awarded a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Anthropology (with a specialization in Primatology) from the University of California, Davis, in December 2017 where she was coadvised by Dr. Meg Crofoot and Dr. Andrew Marshall. She recently completed a Fulbright ASEAN U.S. Scholar grant where she held a joint position as a lab associate with the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She is currently the lead scientist for the Southeast Asia Project at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab.