I am an evolutionary biologist dedicated to understanding how animals think, learn, and adapt to a changing world. My journey began at the University of Zurich (PhD 2016), where I explored the roots of culture and curiosity in orangutans. After research stints in Tübingen and Lausanne, and a Fellowship at the interdisciplinary hub of Collegium Helveticum, I now lead my own research group at UZH. Today, my work bridges the gap between primates and social carnivores I manage two flagship initiatives in South Africa: the Urban Vervet Project, which explores primate resilience and behavioural adaptation to the Anthropocene, and the Mongoose Cognition Project at the Kalahari Research Centre, where we track the longitudinal development of intelligence in wild meerkats.
Group Leader / Principal Investigator: Dr. Sofia Forss
The Mongoose Cognition Project
Tommaso Saccà (PhD Student)
Tommaso received his master’s degree in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands in 2021. His degree incorporates two distinct projects. First, he studied wild and domestic Ungulate dynamics under different livestock management in the African Savanna of Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. He then worked on the role of male intrasexual aggression and female dominance in vervet monkeys under the supervision of Professor Charlotte K Hemelrijk (University of Groningen) and Professor Erica van de Waal (University of Lausanne). In 2022 he joined the Animal Behaviour Group at the University of Zurich to start his PhD adventure and study how social life, motivation, and ecology influence cognitive abilities and fitness in meerkats.
Dr. Mijke Müller (Postdoctoral researcher)
Mijke did her PhD at the University of Prettoria on cognition in yellow mongoose in an urbanised population of South Africa. As a local expert in the field, she was recruited to join the Forss group in 2026 as a postdoc enforcing the longitudinal meerkat cognition study. She is enrolled at the University of Freestate, bridging collaboration between University of Zurich and South Africa.
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.
Nicole Keller (MSc student)
Nicole is doing her MSc thesis with us within the Animal behaviour MSc programme at the University of Zurich. Her research project investigates early life development of personality traits and their robustness through life taking a longitudinal approach. Nicole thereby works both with existing data and is spending six months out in the Kalahari collecting data on wild meerkats.
Laura Petzold (MSc student)
Laura joined the group as a MSc student within University of Zurich’s Biodiversity programme. Her thesis work presents a comparative study on spatial and physical cognition in meerkat and the impact of environment on spatial learning and extractive foraging. For this she will work both with our wild population at the Kalahari Research Centre and captive meerkats at our UZH population and at the Zurich Zoo.
The Urban Vervet Project
Dr. Stèphanie Mercier (UVP data manager)
After stepping back from her onsite manager role, Stef is still working part-time for UVP overseeing the database and assists with data technicalities and processing.
Dr. Tobias Süess (UVP onsite manager, Simbithi)
His long-term passion for social mammals led him to embark on this new journey at UVP. As a wildlife ecologist, Tobias has studied herpetofauna and mammal sociality. He is particularly excited about exploring how group composition, dynamics and relatedness affect cooperation in social mammals inhabiting complex landscapes. His PhD at the University of Prettoria was on the population dynamics and genetics of social mole-rats in and around Pretoria region. Before becoming the UVP on-site manager in 2025, he also studied whether morphology affects reproductive success in German bats.
Valeria Simenova
Valeria is a MSc Environmental Biology student from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She joined the UVP to study anthropogenic impacts on primates’ personality traits. For this purpose, she has conducted both observational data as well as a predator-exposure experiment, with the aim to provide insights on how risk-taking links to foraging activities related to raiding human food sources.
Emma Chen (MSc student)
Emma holds a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She joined the UVP team first as a research assistant in 2024 and started her MSc of Biodiversity at the University of Zurich in 2025, researching spatial range use in urbanized vervet monkeys and how positive experiences impacts their movement decisions, in other word weather they navigate a landscape of joy. Emma is also dedicated to journalism and science communication, aiming to make science accessible and engaging to a broader audience. She currently contributes to the UVP’s outreach efforts, coordinating social media communications, assisting with the monthly newsletters, and supporting website updates.
Yke Snijder (MSc student)
Yke is a MSc student in Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has a broad interest in animal cognition and behaviour. Previously, he has worked on projects concerning foraging cognition in zoo-housed mandrills and chimpanzees in ARTIS Amsterdam Zoo, as well as the effect of breeding restrictions on welfare and social dynamics in zoo-housed Barbary macaques across several Dutch zoos. Yke joined the UVP to study the relationship between social dynamics and “raiding” or opportunistic foraging on anthropogenic foods that the urbanised monkeys at Simbithi regularly engage in. The project aims to understand both how individuality shape opportunistic feeding behaviour and to characterize the social tolerance and relationships impacting these feeding events.
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.
Vera Konst (MSc student)
Vera is a second-year MSc student of Biological Sciences: Evolution of Behavior and Mind at the University of Amsterdam, the Neatherlands. With a background in neuroscience, Vera previously compared neural connections in the primate and carnivoran brain, to better understand the evolution of their social cognition. Now, at UVP, she is looking at play behavior, aiming to describe and understand the role of play in the vervet monkeys’ population in Simbithi.
Tobias Etter (MSc student)
Tobias has a BSc in Biology at the Zurich University and joined Dr. Forss local team in 2025 to continue at UZH’s Biodiversity MSc programme. In 2026 he will undertake his MSc thesis work at the UVP and join the onsite team at Simbithi. For his thesis Tobias research vervet monkeys’ risk-perception when encountering evolutionary novel predators like domestic dogs. Tobias will apply an experimental approach to disentangle what risk cues urbanised populations take into consideration when responding to potential predators.
Ella Kaskikallio (MSc student)
Ella joined the Forss research group in 2026 as a master student from University of Helsinki, Finland. She nicely bridges Sofia’s home country with the research of primate urbanization expanding collaborations in the North. In her research with UVP Ella will study how traffic impacts urban vervet monkeys behaviour and how they adapt (or fail to do so) to the threats of cars.
Ape curiosity & Cognition
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.
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.
Alumnis
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
Elisa was as a Research Assistant at the Meerkat Cognition Project at Kalahari Research Centre, investigating the influence of social life, motivation, and ecology on cognitive abilities and fitness in meerkats. After working with us she decided to continue to work with the Kalahari Meerkats and is now pursuing a PhD with Prof. Marta Manser at the University of Zurich.
Zoe Turner
Zoe finished her master studies with us by the end of 2024 and is now moving on to search for her PhD dream. In the meantime, she is still working as a research assistant for the Mongoose Cognition Project.
Adrian Mc Connell
Adrian completed his master’s degree in biology from the University of Lausanne as part of the UVP. For his thesis, Adrian studied foraging behaviour and diet composition in urban vervet monkeys, with a sub-part focusing on dietary adaptation due to urbanization.
Natacha Bande
Natacha did her master’s with the Urban Vervet Project studying human-vervet interactions, with a special focus on the relationship between vervet monkeys and domestic dogs. She graduated from the ecology, ethology, and ecophysiology program at the University of Strasbourg Summer 2024.
Melissa Ardila
Melissa was a research assistant at the Urban Vervet Project in 2024 and thereafter moved on to start a PhD at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Clementine Serre, Research Assistant
Research assistant for the Meerkat Cognition Project at the Kalahari Research Centre and the Urban Vervet Project in 2024 and 2025.
Claire Giraudet, Research Assistant
Research assistant for the Meerkat Cognition Project at the Kalahari Research Centre, between 2024 and 2025.
Dr. Elisa Bandini
Elisa did her postdoctoral work at UZH in 2023-2025 launching the Ape Research Index Project. She then received her ERC Starting Grant and continues her career at the Universidade do Algarve in Portugal.
Benjamin Robira
Benjamin did a postdoc in the Forss group at the UZH for 18 months in 2024 – 2025. His valuable insights on primates’ spatial navigation enriched the Urban Vervet Project and the research on how urbanization impacts space use across environments.
Paige Barnes
Paige graduated from UZH Animal Behaviour MSc Program in 2025 with her thesis focusing on behavioural flexibility and innovativeness in semi-urban vervet monkeys.
Oceane Lüscher
Oceane achieved her MSc degree from the University of Lausanne in 2025. For her thesis she compared physical problem-solving skills between wild (Inkawu Vervet Project), urban (Urban Vervet Project) and captive (CROW sanctuary) monkeys.
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