Keynote Speakers
We are proud to offer keynote talks on three days at GfP 2024.
Orangutan development, cognition, and conservation
This plenary session, featuring a joint presentation by the orangutan scientists Maria van Noordwijk and Carel van Schaik, will take place on Thursday March 14th at an evening event open to the public.
Maria van Noordwijk
Maria van Noordwijk studied biology in Utrecht (PhD 1985). Throughout the 80’s she studied mainly long-tailed macaques in a Sumatran rain forest with a focus on individual career trajectories of both females and males: patterns in reproduction, dispersal and dominance throughout their lives. After a period with more focus on early childhood education in Durham NC (USA), she was the research coordinator of the Tuanan Orangutan Research Project in Kalimantan for 15 years, based at the University of Zürich. Her studies on orangutans include developmental trajectories as well as the cost of motherhood, and reproductive strategies of both sexes. Currently she is a fellow of the Max Planck Society based at the Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz.
Carel van Schaik
Carel van Schaik studied biology in Utrecht (PhD 1985). He was a professor at Duke University (USA) from 1989 until 2004, when he moved to the University of Zurich to lead the Anthropological Institute and Museum. Initially, he was interested in how the environment and the life histories of primate species shape their societies. He subsequently studied orangutans, setting up two new field sites, and studied their socioecology and culture. This gradually turned him into an evolutionary anthropologist, whose main aim is to understand what made us (one bipedal great ape among many) human. In addition to writing scientific papers and books, Kai Michel and he also try to convey the new insights of evolutionary anthropology to a broader audience through trade books. Currently he is a fellow of the Max Planck Society based at the Institute of Animal Behavior, Konstanz.
Conversations between primate and non-primate researchers
For two plenary sessions, we are organizing ‘conversations’ between primate and non-primate researchers working on similar topics. The researchers will give independent talks, followed by a moderated panel discussion at the end of each session.
One session will be on social foraging and information sharing, with Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez (primates) and Dina Dechmann (bats). A second session will be on cognition, with Sarah Brosnan (primates), and Alex Jordan (fish).
Dina Dechmann
Dina Dechmann studied biology in Zurich (PhD 2005). She joined the University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB, at the time Ornithology) in 2009, where she leads the ephemeral resource adaptations group. She is interested in the behavioral, morphological and physiological adaptations of animals to food landscapes that are variable or unpredictable in time and or space. A strong focus from the very beginning has been how social information use can help animals find food more efficiently and predictably, and how this benefit may be linked to the formation and persistence of groups. She predominantly studies these questions in bats and shrews with several long-term studies in Panama, Germany and Africa.Currently she is a research group leader at the MPI-AB.
Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez studied biology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD 2001). His main interests lie in the behavioral and cognitive mechanisms underlying social complexity, as well as its ecological consequences. Has focused most of his research on fission-fusion dynamics in spider monkeys, using agent-based models, social network analysis and information theory to understand the way in which properties of the social structure emerge from social interactions. Lately he’s become very interested in collective intelligence, exploring the way in which fission-fusion dynamics allows a group to forage in a distributed fashion. Co-managed a field study on spider monkeys in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, for 24 years. Currently he is a researcher at the Institute on Applied Mathematics and Systems at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Sarah Brosnan
Sarah Brosnan studied biology at Emory University (PhD 2004). She studies decision-making in humans and other primates, particularly decisions relating to cooperation and inequality, and how those decision processes evolved. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms that individuals use to make these decisions, and how social and environmental contexts influence them. Although her research initially focused primarily on capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees, two highly cooperative primates, she has become interested in broader taxonomic comparisons, including a variety of primates as well as canids and reptiles. Currently she is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Philosophy and Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State University.
Alex Jordan
Alex is interested in how behaviour has evolved, what the adaptive value of behaviour is, and what the mechanisms that underlie behaviour are. He seeks to understand how the physical structure of behavior changes over evolutionary time, how conserved patterns of behaviour can take on new function, how social interactions are modified by current context, how animals perceive and cognitively process social cues, and how environments – both social and physical – change and are changed by behaviour. Prior to joining the MPIAB, Alex was the Integrative Biology Fellow, working in collaboration with Mike Ryan, Dan Bolnick, and Hans Hofmann at UT Austin, and before that a JSPS fellow in Osaka working with Masanori Kohda. He completed his PhD with Rob Brooks at the University of NSW, and did his undergraduate honours thesis with Madeleine Beekman and Ben Oldroyd at the University of Sydney.