About us

ESLR is a community for early-career researchers interested in human and non-human animal culture, behaviour and learning. Our aim is to connect students, PhDs, postdocs, and other early-career researchers working across disciplines, including biology, psychology, anthropology, economics, sociology, archaeology, and computer science.

We run friendly events, discussions, and opportunities for networking and collaboration.

Membership is now completely free. To keep up to date with our upcoming events, please subscribe to our mailing list.

Committee

Katelyn Bonner

HEC Lausanne

Katelyn is a PhD student in economics at the University of Lausanne. She holds a MSc in economics from the University of Lausanne and a BSc in Actuarial Science from Florida State University. Her research interests include cultural evolution, economic history, inequality, and institutions.

Luca Hahn

University of Exeter

Luca is a PhD student at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus. He is fascinated by “social minds”, i.e. the intersection of cognition, sociality, and culture in animals including humans. He is currently investigating social relationships and social information use in wild jackdaws.

Maria Pykälä

HEC Lausanne

Maria is a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior at the University of Lausanne and a member of the PACE lab. Her research focuses on cultural evolution and collective intelligence in both our evolutionary past and hybrid human-machine future. She uses experiments and simulations to study how people learn, innovate, and transmit knowledge.

Alexander Schakowski

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Alexander is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. With a MSc in psychology, his research focuses on social information use and social dynamics during foraging in humans. He investigates these topics in natural environments and experimental settings.

Ishaan Sinha

University of Exeter

Ishaan is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. He is broadly interested in the evolution of animal cognition, particularly the emergence of behavioural 'modernity' in humans. He is currently investigating variation in personality and its links to social learning.