Judith Burkart, Ph.D. is a Professor at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zurich. She studied Developmental Psychology in Fribourg, Switzerland, and got her PHD in Vienna, Austria. She is currently the head of the Evolutionary Cognition Group and director of the University’s Primate Station. The aim of her group is to contribute to a better understanding of the evolutionary origin of the human mind. To do so, they identify both similarities and differences in social, motivational and cognitive processes in human and nonhuman primates. One of our unique features, relative to the great apes, is cooperative breeding. A main focus therefore concerns the role of cooperative breeding, which we share with more distantly related primates. By studying the cooperatively breeding common marmosets and systematically comparing them with more independently breeding species, J. Burkart aims at identifying processes that are systematically associated with shared infant care. She has published over 100 scientific articles that are well cited and received broad funding, including a current ERC consolidator grant. 

 Working title for talk: The cooperative breeding model of human evolution

David P. Schmitt, Ph.D. is the Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution within Brunel University London’s College of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in personality psychology from the University of Michigan in 1995. Professor Schmitt is Founding Director of the International Sexuality Description Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration involving 100s of psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists from around the world who seek to understand how gender, culture, and personality combine to influence mental health and well-being. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles on human sexual diversity, his work having been cited over 22,000 times. Professor Schmitt currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the new journal, Culture and Evolution, and he was recently elected president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

Working title for talk: The Gender Shift Hypothesis: Threats and Opportunities When Studying Culture-Specific Expressions of Gendered Psychology around the World

Gil Guastoni Rosenthal, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biology at the University of Padova and co-director of the CICHAZ field station in Hidalgo state, Mexico. His group studies the evolution of social behavior, particularly sexual communication, and its effects on gene flow between species. He has worked extensively on behavior and genomics of natural hybrids of swordtail fish (Xiphophorus) of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental, earning several major research grants and publishing over 100 scientific works including Mate Choice (Princeton, 2017) and recent reviews in Science (2022) and Trends (2019, 2022).

Working title for talk: Nonhuman animals are more human than we think

Hanna Kokko, Ph.D. works in two interesting and important interfaces: to understand how evolutionary and ecological processes interact and to enhance communication between empiricists and theoreticians. Working at this crossroads makes it clear that it is far too simplistic to view evolution as a process where better adapted genotypes continually arise and replace their less successful competitors, especially if we assume that population performance as a whole. There are many reasons for this. As an example, populations of many species consists of males and females, and selection can favor different traits in them, not always to the benefit of adaptedness to the environment if this is measured at the population level. Spatiotemporal variation in environments creates another set of challenges that are not always easy to adapt to – especially on a planet undergoing rapid anthropological change.

Working title for talk: How to organize one's life when lives sometimes end early

David Sloan Wilson, Ph.D. has made foundational contributions to evolutionary science and its relevance to positive cultural change at all scales (from individuals to the planet) and all topic areas. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus as Binghamton University in New York and president of the nonprofit organization ProSocial World. A complete archive of his work can be found at davidsloanwilson.world.

Working title for talk: Multilevel Cultural Evolution: From New Theory to Practical Applications (click here)

WInner of the Professor Jan Strzałko Award for outstanding young scientist

Juan Olvido Perea-García, Ph.D. was trained as a historical linguist, and later worked as a researcher in psychology. With a life-long interest in evolutionary processes, his education culminated with a PhD in Biology. Juan Olvido wants to understand the basal structures and functions that give rise to characteristically human traits, such as language or sophisticated modes of interaction and cooperation. His main line of research focuses on the primate origins of human external eye appearance. Recently, Juan Olvido’s work suggests our striking eye appearance - and, in turn, our extreme reliance on ocular signaling - were only possible thanks to novel distribution of epithelial stem cells in the human limbus. In parallel, his work assesses functions of ocular signaling in human and non-human primates. Integrating behavioral ecology and psychology in an evolutionary framework, Juan Olvido envisions describing the natural history of external eye appearance and ocular signaling in hominins leading to our own lineage.

Working title for the talk: Eyes as seen: towards a natural history of signaling functions of the human eye