Julia Fischer

Julia Fischer obtained her PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1996 with a study on the vocal communication of macaques. After research visits to the NIH and Harvard University, she was offered a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, she conducted 18 months field research on wild baboons in the Okavango delta in Botswana. In 20001, she moved to the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She obtained her habilitation in 2004 and was awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship. In the same year, she became a professor at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen, a joint appointment with the German Primate Center where she is head of the Cognitive Ethology Laboratory. Her research centers on the vocal communication, cognition and social behavior of nonhuman primates, but she also studied the word learning abilities of a domestic dog and the ultrasonic communication of mice. In 2007, she established a field station in Senegal to study Guinea baboons and West African vervet monkeys. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, president of the European Federation of Primatology, and serves as Panel Chair for the ERC Starting Grants program.