Hare Lab: (front row from left to right) Korrina Duffy, Rachna Reddy, Jingzhi "Hippo" Tan, Napoleon, Evan MacLean, Kara Leimberger (second row) Phoebe, Aaron Sandel, Ashton Madison, Carly Mobley, Alana Bossen, Ashley Baleno, (third row), Mona Xiao, Leah Kaiser, Emma Blumstein, Tara Jennings, Katie Patellos, Abby Jamieson-Drake, (fourth row) Dr. Brian Hare, Courtnea Rainey, Camila Caceres, Joel Bray, Ben Finkel, Katie Shoemaker, Kerri Rodriguez, (on wall) Kara Schroepfer, and Alex Rosati.
Director
Brian Hare
Brian Hare is an associate professor in Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (part of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences). He founded the Hominoid Psychology Research Group in 2004 after receiving the Sofia Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He and the Hominoid Psychology Research Group arrived at Duke in January 2008. In 2009 he started the Duke Canine Cognition Center which is dedicated to the study of dog psychology and the effect of domestication on cognition.
Research Scientist
Vanessa Woods
Vanessa has worked in Congo since 2005, conducting research and outreach activities, as well as serving on the board of Friends of Bonobos, the US charity that supports Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary. Vanessa is the author of Bonobo Handshake, a non-fiction about her work and time in Congo.
Post-Doc
Evan MacLean
The broad aim of my research is to address human social cognitive evolution through comparative studies extant taxa. At present I am working primarily with apes, prosimians, and domestic dogs. My research interests fall into two main categories. The first concerns the evolution of theory of mind, our ability to think about the thoughts of others. I am investigating to what degree we share this capacity with other great apes with the hope of understanding what changes were critical in the evolution of uniquely human cognition. My second area of interest concerns how cognition evolves. What are the selective pressures that influence cognition and do species differ in predictable ways that map on to ecology?
Group Manager
Korrina Duffy
I received a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona in 2009 and completed minors in Anthropology, German, and Chemistry. Toward the end of my studies I became increasingly interested in the intersection between evolution, anthropology, and psychology which led me into the field of comparative cognition. I currently work as the lab manager in the Hare Lab.
Graduate Students
Alex Rosati
Primates in the wild face complex foraging decisions: choosing the most ‘valuable’ of potential resources to exploit, remembering the location and navigating between widely distributed options, and dealing with conspecifics that are attempting to do the same thing. My research focuses on how animals solve these problems. Specifically, I compare behavioral strategies and psychological abilities in primates--including lemurs, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans.
Jingzhi Tan
Humans are incredibly skillful in working with others. We cooperate in large-scale for a long term with unfamiliar strangers even in a costly way. However, how human cooperation evolved remains a mystery. Are we ultra-cooperators because we evolved to be genuinely altruistic to others or because we became more trusting to strangers? I study the psychological mechanisms of cooperation and trust in humans, nonhuman primates and dogs.
Kara Schroepfer
My research focuses on the evolution of social behavior & cognition, primarily in apes. My main interest is in understanding the ontogeny of social relationships, particularly during female-transfer in Pan species where adolescents must leave their natal group and integrate quickly into a neighboring community before they can begin reproduction. I am also interested in what constrains social behavior in female chimpanzees, such as energetic and nutritional requirements and offspring development. I approach these questions by combining observational field studies with sanctuary-based cognition and energetic experiments.
Chris Krupenye
My interest is in social decision making processes and the development of social skills in nonhumans. I am particularly curious about the proximate mechanisms that may underlie social interaction such as intention-reading, planning and reciprocity, and how these mediators evolved.
Victoria Woober
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. The aim of my research is to investigate the origins of human social behavior and cognition, including the underlying physiological mechanisms.
My research focuses on humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). I compare behavior, cognition, and endocrinology in these two species, with the hypothesis that developmental shifts in these traits have resulted in the phenotypic differences seen both within the genus Pan and between Pan and modern humans. I also study domestic dogs as a model for the evolution of human social cognition, with a particular focus on their use of humans' communicative cues.
Field Research Coordinator
Suzy Kwetuenda
Suzy graduated with a Masters in Ecology from Kinshasa University. She has been working with the Hare research group since 2005, and was instrumental in establishing the early research program at Lola ya Bonobo sanctaury in Congo. Apart from helping the Hare group with research, Suzy also manages the bonobo reintroduction program, including oversight of bonobo post-release monitoring activities, anti-poaching patrols, outreach and school education, and community mobilization.
Undergraduate Students
Rachna Reddy
Class of 2012, Evolutionary Anthropology
Joel Bray
Class of 2013, Evolutionary Anthropology
Joel is an independent study student in the Hare Lab working on a project involving social cognition in lemurs. He is interested in whether lemurs prefer to retrieve food that a human experimenter cannot see. After finding that ring-tailed lemurs prefer to take food from behind a human experimenter over food in front of the experimenter, he is now testing ring-tailed lemurs and mongoose lemurs in an experiment to determine the types of cues (body orientation, head orientation, eyes) the lemurs are using to retrieve the food. His research interests involve the following topics: cognitive evolution, theory of mind, social behavior, foraging ecology, human and nonhuman apes, and lemurs.
Ben Finkel
Class of 2013, Evolutionary Anthropology B.S. and Environmental Sciences B.S.
Ben is a sophomore undergraduate working in the Hare Lab. He splits his time between outreach projects and assisting with ecological psychology research. On one hand, he runs studies on the relationship between ecology and decision making in human and non-human primates. A main question is how does evolutionary environment affect the psychology of making risky versus safe decisions? His other project is in education and conservation outreach for the lab. He helps run the Friends of Bonobo blog, Primate Palooza, and fundraisers for Lola Ya Bonobo. His favorite part of outreach, however, is going into local schools to teach about bonobos, conservation, and evolution. He's interested in how evolutionary knowledge can be applied to improve teaching strategies. His general research interests include: conservation psychology, ecological anthropology, empathy, and conservation biology.
Alumni
Kerri Rodriguez
Class of 2011, Evolutionary Anthropology, B.S. and Biology, B.S.
Kerri graduated in May 2011. She spent many of her days conducting research at the Duke Lemur Center and completed a senior thesis project entitled “How do lemurs remember? A comparative spatial and long-term memory study of ecologically distinct prosimian primates”. Her project looked at how selective factors, such as food availability or social structure, have led to the neurological differentiation in various species of folivorous and frugivorous lemurs. Specifically, the project compared the strategies used for remembering spatial locations under both short term and long term delays. Her broad research interests include: behavioral ecology, comparative cognition, social behavior, foraging behavior, and cooperation.
Sandeep Prasanna
Class of 2011, The Development of Language: Phylogeny, Ontogeny, and History (Program II - Individual Curriculum)Sandeep graduated in May 2011 and completed his senior thesis on a project entitled "Let's talk: why do we cooperate?" His study investigated the role of communication in human cooperation asking questions such as: How does communication affect our willingness to cooperate? How does communication compare to altruistic punishment in affecting levels of cooperation, and which do people prefer to engage in? His broad research interests include: evolution of language, cooperation, communication, punishment, sociolinguistics, and body language/gestural communication.
Kara Leimberger
Class of 2011, Evolutionary Anthropology
Kara graduated in May 2011 after having worked in the Hare Lab on primate education and conservation outreach in Durham schools.
Aaron Sandel
Completed his BA in 2010 and received honors for his thesis on lemur social cognition that has now been submitted for publication. For one year he worked as Dr. Anne Pusey's research associate and is currently Dr. John Mitani's graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Dr. Esther Herrmann played a pivotal role in establishing our relationship with and conducting the first research at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Congo-Brazzaville
Dr. Alicia Melis played a pivotal role in establishing our relationship with and conducting the first research at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda.
Both are currently Post-doctoral associates at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and continue to conduct cutting edge research at PASA sanctuaries
