Catherine Crockford

Research Director

Head of the The Great Ape Social Mind Lab

Co-director of Tai Chimpanzee Project

Institute for Cognitive Sciences Marc-Jeannerod, CNRS, Lyon

 

A central theme of Catherine's research is assessing socio-cognitive and communicative variation across primates to provide insights into the evolution of the primate social brain and primate societies. She obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and University of Leipzig in 2005 on the vocal output of wild chimpanzees. She conducted two post-doctoral positions, first with Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth at the University of Pennsylvania studying wild chacma baboon social cognition and stress in relation to social relationships, and second with Klaus Zuberbühler at St. Andrews University studying the socio-cognitive and neuroendocrine control of social relationships of wild chimpanzees, with a British Academy Fellowship. She then took up a Group Leader position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and was awarded an ERC starter grant ‘ApeAttachement’ to examine maternal effects on social development of wild chimpanzees, before joining the CNRS. She is also a core PI in the Evolution of Brain Connectivity Project in collaboration with Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Human Cognitive Sciences. For further information, please see: https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/catherine-crockford/