Tommaso Saccà (PhD Student)

Claire Giraudet, Research Assistant

Claire graduated with a Master of Animal and Human Behavior from Rennes 1 University in 2021. Her MSc thesis focused on the effects of age and sex on the activity patterns and social interactions of a Finnish wolf pack. Thereafter, she spent one year in Hong Kong as a research assistant at City University of Hong Kong, where she was originally supposed to start a project on the welfare of kennel-housed police dogs. The study unfortunately got cancelled, which led her to switch to helping two PhD students working on feral cattle and a lot of fieldwork experience. Most recently, she spent four months in Agadir, Morocco, to study feral dogs and particularly puppies, once again as a research assistant for the University of Vienna. Having specialized in canine behavior most of her scholar and then professional career, she presently serves as a research assistant at the Meerkat Cognition Project at Kalahari Research Centre, tackling a whole new species.

Martina Andersson (MSc student)

Martina’s home university is in Sweden at the University of Lund where she is enrolled in the master’s program of Zoology. For her master thesis she will join our meerkat cognition team and spend her time investigating behavioural flexibility and innovativeness in wild meerkats at the Kalahari Research Centre.

Clementine Serre, Research Assistant

Clémentine is a research assistant for the Meerkat Cognition Project at the Kalahari Research Centre. Fascinated by ethology, philosophy, and animal cognition, she strives to shift the human-centred perspective to uncover and understand different forms of animal “intelligence”. Her background includes a year as a field assistant for the Mandrillus Project which primarily aims to study the behavior, ecology, and social dynamics of Mandrillus sphinx in their natural habitat in Gabon. The project seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the species’ complex social interactions, reproductive strategies, and the factors affecting their health and survival. She has also collaborated with AAP on the Born to be Wild project, participating in the rehabilitation of Barbary macaques in Tazekka National Park, in Morocco. Always curious and dedicated, she combines philosophy and ethology in her quest to understand the interactions and interconnectedness between humans and other animals.

The long-term experience working with wild vervet monkeys, her love for this sometimes “naughty” species, and her desire to take a turn in her career brought Stef to the Urban Vervet Project, of which she is now the on-site manager. Stef is habituating and identifying the troops of our new study population, training our students, and collecting data on these urban monkeys at the Simbithi Eco Estate, Ballito South Africa.

Benjamin is a behavioural ecologist, mainly interested in understanding the causes and consequences of animal cognition, which he is studying through the movement lens. He is therefore specialised in the processing and analysis of movement and behavioural data, as well as statistical, mechanistic and agent-based modelling.

Paige Barnes (MSc student)

Paige completed a BS degree from Michigan State University in both Statistics and Zoology with a concentration in Animal Behaviour and Neurobiology along with a minor in Computer Science. Her behavioural and cognitive experiences include working with mountain gorillas in Uganda and studying chimpanzees in Africa while a lab manager at the University of Michigan. From June 2023 Paige joins the UVP as a Master student from the University of Zurich. Her research will focus on cognitive abilities in urban monkeys as well as their innovative behaviours arising in this human transformed habitat.

Emma Chen, Research Assistant

Emma holds a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Her thesis focused on understanding the influence of early life experiences on the current display of abnormal behaviours in rescued chimpanzees at the MONA Sanctuary in Spain. In September 2024, Emma joined the UVP team to research spatial range use (landscapes of joy & fear) in semi-urban vervets. Passionate about animal behaviour and cognition, Emma is also dedicated to journalism and science communication, aiming to make science accessible and engaging to a broader audience.

Oceane Lüscher (Msc student)

Oceane holds a bachelor’s in biology from the University of Lausanne and currently she is completing her master’s degree in Behaviour, Evolution and Conservation at the same university. For her masters project and thesis, she will join the Urban Vervet Project and study innovative behaviours in semi-urban monkeys as well as their cognitive abilities. Generally, Oceane has diverse interests including animal behaviour, neuroscience, and conservation.

Durr-E- Ajam Riaz, Associated Researcher

Durré is a behavioral biologist from New York, USA, and holds a M.Sc. in Behavioral Biology from the University of Göttingen, Germany. For her master’s thesis, she measured and validated salivary biomarkers of welfare in zoo-housed bonobos. During her studies, she gained two years of research experience at the German Primate Center, where she annotated acoustic recordings of vervet alarm calls and examined inter-individual variation in call production. Supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Durré joined the UVP team in November 2024 with a research focus on vocal flexibility in the alarm calling behavior of urban vervet monkeys in an anthropogenic environment.

Dr. Elisa Bandini

Elisa completed her PhD at The University of Tübingen in 2018 working with Dr Claudio Tennie on the individual learning abilities of captive and semi-wild primates. After her PhD, she started a postdoctoral position at UoT looking into the stone tool-use abilities of wild capuchins (funded by the Leakey Foundation), wild macaques (funded by the Seedcorn Grant), semi-wild chimpanzees and captive orangutans. Since April 2023, Elisa is part of the cognition team at the Animal Behaviour Group, where she is working on the ARI project, researching the experience effects on chimpanzee cognition. Elisa is funded by The Forschungskredit, University of Zurich as well as the prestigious award from the Einstein Foundation, Berlin.

Christine Hrubesch (Associated Research Assistant)

Christine has extensive experience with captive chimpanzees for multiple years and from multiple projects, conducted at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Center and at the Leintalzoo in Germany. She is now working on Great Ape Curiosity with us, funded by the Early Career Collaboration Grant from the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute.

Saein Lee, Postdoc & Associated ResearcherSaein received her PhD from Ewha Womans University, South Korea in 2023, where she conducted research on the development of social relationships in both wild and captive gibbons. During her doctoral studies, she collaborated with Prof. Erica van de Waal at the University of Lausanne to investigate social partner preferences and social networks regarding social learning in wild Javan gibbons. She then broadened her research interests to curiosity in non-human primates and humans through a collaboration with Dr. Sofia Forss. Together we received Early Career Collaboration Enhancement (ECCE) Award from the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute (DISI) in 2023 to work on the Great Ape Curiosity project. Since August 2023, she has been employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Life-Management Lab at the University of Zurich, where she is focusing on studying prosocial behavior across adulthood in humans.

Lindsey Ellington (MSc student)

Lindsey studied at the University of Groening in the Netherlands and was the first student to join the Urban Vervet Project to do her MSc thesis with us. Her research with the Simbithi monkeys focused on exploration and object curiosity in urban monkeys. Lindsey graduated in 2023 and her thesis can be found here: Thesis Ellington

Manon Desaivres (MSc student)

Manon graduated in ethology at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University in 2023. For her MSc project she joined UVP to research human-wildlife conflicts in South Africa, studying human-vervet interactions, using both citizen science data and behavioural observations. Thesis Desaivres

Elisa Protopapa

Zoe Turner

Adrian Mc Connell

Natacha Bande

Melissa Ardila