I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory and a co-director of the Anthro Primatology at Emory Research Team (APE Lab). I completed a joint PhD at the University of Michigan in Biopsychology and Biological Anthropology in 2016 followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia State University before joining Emory in Spring 2020.

I am broadly​ interested in the evolution of primate social cognition, the mechanisms that influence social choices, and the context in which these decisions are adaptive. My current research unpacks both proximate and ultimate mechanisms of social decision-making in primates, offering a promising avenue for understanding the importance of sociality, cooperation, and conflict on primate cognitive evolution.  I direct the Social Cognition and Primate Behavior Lab at Emory where we examine how primates make important social decisions, what underlying factors impact these choices, and why these decisions are adaptive. We tackle these questions from an evolutionary and comparative perspective while utilizing a mechanistic approach, through the integration of behavioral observations and experimental paradigms on wild monkeys at our field station, Capuchins de Taboga, in Costa Rica, and on captive capuchins at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University, and the assessment and manipulation of hormones, at our Social Endocrinology Lab at Emory.

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Research Interests: 

Behavioral endocrinology, communication, cooperation, decision-making, evolution of social behavior, sexual selection, signaling, social cognition, primatology.