Blog

The influence of captive environments and human exposure on cognitive mechanisms in animals remain poorly understood. Although diminished neophobia, resulting from a safer environment and more “free” time, has been proposed to cause intraspecific differences between wild and captive individuals, we know less about how human exposure influences exploration tendency.... read more →

Happy days and probably the highlight of 2021; I am excited to share the news that I have received an Ambizione Grant to start my own research group in 2022, within the Animal behavior unit at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich. This project... read more →

Past Summer I was lucky to be accepted a place in the transdisciplinary Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI). This involved three weeks of intense interactions and workshops with other early career researchers interested in the origins, nature and future of intelligences. These weeks and all the newly gained professional colleagues... read more →

Hand in Hand with my experience at the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute, the Summer of 2021 continued to boost my transdisciplinary interests, as I was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum - the joint Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) of the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and Zurich... read more →

In December 2021, my application to continue the studies on primate curiosity was awarded a three-year grant by the Finnish Kone Foundation. The Kone Foundation rewards especially bold and ground-breaking research initiatives from both the sciences and the arts. It also holds a community of grantees that have the extraordinary... read more →

Part of my postdoc project has been to study curiosity in captive vervets. So after collecting the data at Mawana and the wild monkeys, we moved to this lovely place just outside Vreyheid, SA - WATCH vervet monkey rehabilitation center - were I been collecting some more data. It’s been... read more →