Hi 👋
I am Rahel a PostDoc in the Evolutionary Cognition Group at the University of Zürich. I am a behavioural biologist with a special interest for primates 🐒.
During my PhD I worked on topics of social evaluation and third-party understanding in common marmosets – a prerequisite for morality and theory of mind abilities. I used naturally occurring vigilance behavior to investigate marmosets understanding of their conspecifics behavior and attentional states, investigated marmosets sensitivity to audience effects and combined a novel experimental approach and thermography as a non-invasive method to measure arousal levels to assess marmosets understanding of third parties and their evaluation of them.
For my PostDoc I am Part of the ERC Research Project ENGINE where we are investigating the consequences of interdependence in cooperatively breeding common marmosets to further our understanding of why human minds are so unique.
I am passionate about all things as well as teaching and mentoring students.
Education
University of Zürich (Switzerland) | PhD in Evolutionary Biology | September 2017 – February 2022
University of Zürich (Switzerland) | Switzerland MSc in Biology | September 2015 – February 2017
University of Bern (Switzerland) | BSc in History and Philosophy of Science (Minor Biology) | September 2010 – January 2015
Interests
Professional | Cognitive Evolution | Thermography | Vigilance | Statistics | Data Viz
Personal Dog-Lover 🐶 | Sewing 🧵 | Hiking 🌄 | Basketball 🏀