I am a behavioural ecologist and primatologist and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pan Lab, led by Dr. Martin Surbeck. 

Before arriving at the department of Human Evolutionary Biology in Harvard, I completed my PhD in Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology where I was advised by Drs. Catherine Crockford and Roman Wittig, and received my Masters in Zoology from the Tel-Aviv University in 2013.

I study the intersection between intergroup dynamics, cooperation, and social bonds in chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, as windows into our past. I am especially interested in questions like what shapes collective action and the emergence of group-level cooperative actions? How does cooperation and social bond maintenance support costly life history trajectories? And how do individuals navigate social decisions beyond the dyad? I approach these questions by observing wild chimpanzees at the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, and wild bonobos at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, DR Congo. In both sites I also oversee the long-term data collection and training of staff and researchers. In my studies I combine behavioral data of social interactions and cooperative exchange together with endocrine biomarkers that reflect underlying physiology of these processes.