Judith Hand

In 2004, two of her novels were published by New York publishing houses, the first, an historical epic set against the background of the Trojan War and the second, a contemporary women's action adventure. More published novels soon followed; all featuring strong heroines struggling in epic conflicts in partnership with equally strong heroes.

In 2003, however, she returned to ethology and self-published Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace. The book draws from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, primatology, behavior, ornithology, cultural anthropology, neurophysiology, and history. Hand has expanded concepts from Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace into essays on her website site, AFutureWithoutWar.org.

After moving from Los Angeles to San Diego in 1987, Hand turned her attention to writing fiction. In 2001, she self-published the novel Voice of the Goddess. In her book Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, Hand states that she was subsequently drawn back into the subject of war and women while promoting this book. The novel's background is the Minoan Culture which Hand portrays as woman-centered, goddess-worshipping, and without wars of aggression, a view she considers valid but which remains controversial.

From 1980 to 1985, she was a Research Associate and Lecturer in the UCLA biology department teaching Animal Behavior and Ornithology. In 1987, she moved from Los Angeles to San Diego and spent several years writing fiction.

After completing her doctorate, she continued behavioral research as a Smithsonian Post-doctoral Fellow at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. (1979–1980). This research resulted in published papers on conflict resolution highlighting the use of egalitarian behavior to resolve conflicts. For example, mated gull pairs in conflict over nesting duties or access to choice food used such methods as sharing, first-come-first-served, and negotiation rather than the commonly studied dominance and subordination behavior to resolve conflicts. Female gulls of the species she studied are always smaller than their mates. In her theoretical paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology (Vol. 61, 1986) she used a game theory approach to introduce the concept of “leverage” to explain why smaller individuals are sometimes able to establish an egalitarian relationship with much larger individuals, ones that could easily dominate them physically. This paper also introduced the concept of “spheres of dominance” to explain why, in a given relationship between two individuals, the relative payoffs to survival or reproduction depends on the context of a conflict. Different contexts will provide different payoffs to each individual and consequently determine which individual of the pair will be dominant in a given context, instead of one individual being dominant over the other in all contexts.

Hand has been a member of the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE), since its inception in 1972. ISHE is a professional organization whose members study human behavior and come from such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology and psychology. The term "peace ethology" was coined by ethologist, Peter Verbeek, as a subdiscipline of human ethology, one that is concerned with issues of human conflict, conflict resolution, reconciliation, war, peacemaking, and peacekeeping behavior.

From 1967 to 1975, Hand taught high school biology at Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica, CA. While still teaching, she began a Ph.D. program at UCLA and in 1979 was awarded a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior, also called Ethology (her subfields were Ornithology and Primatology). Her doctoral dissertation compared vocalizations of two populations of gulls (Larus occidentalis), and the results were used to reclassify the gull population in the Gulf of California as a separate species, (Larus livens), not just a subspecies of Larus occidentalis.

Hand earned a B.S. degree from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, in 1961, graduating summa cum laude, having majored in cultural anthropology before switching to zoology. In 1963, she earned an M.A. degree in general physiology at UCLA, after which she briefly worked as a laboratory technician at UCLA's Brain Research Institute. In 1963-1964, Hand was a research technician at the Max Planck Institute for Neuropsychiatry in Munich, Germany, where she assisted in brain surgeries designed to evoke vocalizations in squirrel monkeys; she published her first scientific papers on these behavioral experiments. From 1965 through 1966, at the Pediatrics Department of the UCLA Medical School, she was head technician in a physiological laboratory studying bilirubin metabolism.

Judith Leon (née Latta) Hand was born in Cherokee, Oklahoma, the daughter of John Leon Latta & Wanda Hazel Latta (1914–1994). Her father, a successful restaurateur, died when she was nine; her mother, a registered nurse, raised Hand and her younger sister alone. Hand graduated from Torrance High School in Torrance, California, in 1957. In 1967, she married Los Angeles police detective, Harold M. Hand, and remained married to him until his death in 1996. They had no children.