Mathilde Grampp

..Mathilde Grampp is currently a PhD student, working under the supervision of Patrick Tkaczynski, Roman Wittig and Catherine Crockford at the University of Leipzig (and at the Taï Chimpanzee Project (TCP) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany). Her main research interest is to examine how behavioural flexibility relates to social complexity in two primate species: wild chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, living in the same habitat, and in large multi-male, multi-female groups, but displaying different degrees of fission-fusion dynamics. Chimpanzees, that exhibit a higher degree of fission-fusion dynamics, may adapt their social behaviours to a larger extent to the social environment than do mangabeys. Her first chapter examines the behavioural flexibility of signalling strategies during social approaches across social contexts, including contexts presumably generating high social uncertainty between partners: fusion, post-conflict and inter-party communication events.

Previously, she conducted a study on juvenile social attention in wild vervet monkeys in South Africa (Inkawu Vervet Project), for her master thesis in ethology at the University of Strasbourg and under the supervision of Cédric Sueur, Erica van de Waal and Jennifer Botting. Then, she worked as a research assistant for the TCP and in Budongo in a wild habituated group of eastern chimpanzees (Uganda) for a study on juvenile socialisation conducted by the University of Neuchâtel..