Invited Speakers

Thanatobase Group

University College London

ThanatoBase is being developed by six researchers from University College London and Oxford University: Alecia Carter, Elisa Fernández Fueyo, Reece Hammond, Eléonore Rolland, Amber Stratton and Mathilde Tahar-Malaussena. The team brings together expertise in evolutionary anthropology, primatology, animal behaviour, and philosophy to advance the emerging field of comparative thanatology. Their collaborative project compiles a global database of primates’ responses to death, enabling large-scale, hypothesis-driven analyses of behaviour, social relationships, and cognition in the context of dying and death.

Jennifer Vonk

Oakland University

USA

Jennifer Vonk is a distinguished professor of Psychology at Oakland University. She has published research on more than 80 species with a broad focus on the evolution of cognition and zoo animal welfare. Her research has explored topics such as concept formation, prosocial behavior, memory, individual recognition and quantity estimation. She is also studying human animal interactions with a focus on how attachment to animals and early life experiences shape empathy toward animals. She has recently become very interested in how animals respond to the death of both conspecifics and caregivers and how these responses are perceived by their caregivers.

Susana Monsó

National University of Distance Education

Spain

Susana Monsó is associate professor of philosophy at the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science of UNED. Her research focuses on the socio-cognitive capacities of animals and their ethical implications. She is the author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death (Princeton University Press, 2024), which is being translated into 12 languages and was listed as one of the best books of 2024 by The New Yorker.

Laura Danón

National University of Córdoba

Argentina

Laura Danón is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, National University of Córdoba, and a researcher at CONICET. Her work lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, animal cognition, and comparative psychology, with a particular focus on the attribution of conceptual capacities and mental content to non-human animals.

Thomas A. Püschel

University of Oxford

Thomas A. Püschel is the Wendy James Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is an evolutionary anthropologist and vertebrate palaeobiologist whose work focuses on human, primate, and mammalian evolution. His research reconstructs and compares the palaeobiology of fossils with that of their living ecological relatives, using approaches including predictive modelling, phylogenetics, 3D morphometrics, virtual biomechanics, computational simulations, phylogenetic comparative methods, and fieldwork, with the aim of better understanding how organismal form, function, behaviour, and diversity evolve over deep time. He recently applied phylogenetic comparative methods to evolutionary thanatology in a study exploring how death-related behaviours can be analysed across species to better understand their evolutionary origins and diversity.

Keynote Speaker

Vukašin Bjelica

University of Belgrade

Serbia

Dr. Vukašin Bjelica is a Research Associate at the Institute of Zoology, Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade. His research focuses on the behavioral ecology and antipredator defenses of reptiles and amphibians, with particular emphasis on snakes of the subfamily Natricinae, especially the genus Natrix. His work investigates how defensive behaviors vary among populations and species and how ecological and evolutionary factors shape these responses. A key focus of this research is on the phenomenon of death-feigning (thanatosis), where he has demonstrated that its expression is shaped by an interplay of ecological, behavioral, and physiological factors, including individual personality traits and stress physiology.

Stephanie Yiru Zhu

University of Washington

USA

Stephanie Zhu is a PhD candidate in the ZYWang Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Her research interests focus on the neuroethology of invertebrates. Her current work investigates death-related social behaviors and dynamics in annually eusocial bumblebees. Specifically, her research explores how workers respond to dead conspecifics and how behavioral, molecular, and sensory mechanisms together shape undertaking behaviors across the social environment. In addition to research, she is passionate about making science more accessible through art and creative outreach.

Renato Borras-Chavez

University of Rhode Island

USA

Dr. Renato Borras-Chavez is a Chilean marine ecologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, USA. His research focuses on the ecology, behavior and evolution of marine mammals, particularly Antarctic and South American pinnipeds (seals and sea lions). He combines field ecology with tools such as biochemical tracers, photo-identification, computer vision, and spatial ecology to investigate behavior, trophic ecology, population dynamics, and responses to environmental change. Renato actively collaborates with international conservation and polar research programs. He is a member of the SCAR Expert Group on Birds and Marine Mammals, and the IUCN Pinniped Specialist Group, where he contributes to species conservation assessments.

Claire Ricci-Bonot

University of Lincoln

Claire Ricci-Bonot received her PhD in Animal Behaviour from the University of Lincoln, UK in 2021, where her research thesis was on social buffering as a potential method to reduce stress response and improve horse welfare. She was then invited by Professor Baragli at the University of Pisa, Italy to work on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition. Her research is focused mainly on the recognition of emotions in horses as well as the interactions between horses. Recently her research has focused on separation anxiety and grief in horses at the University of Lincoln with Professor Mills.

Sarah Paris

Cambridge University

Dr Sarah Paris is an evolutionary bioarchaeologist and Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Bridging biological anthropology and archaeology, her research investigates hominin behavioural evolution as part of the Ng’ipalajem project. Her wider work focuses on developing the archaeothanatology of prehistoric symbolism. Dr Paris integrates high-resolution skeletal analysis, taphonomic experiments, and the prehistoric use of pigments to investigate how the spatial and gestural logic of mortuary behaviour reflects the evolution of social identity, cultural expression, and human cognition from the Pleistocene through to the Holocene.

Sayantan Das

Kannur University

India

Sayantan Das has an Integrated BS-MS degree in Biological Sciences from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. He earned a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Mysore, India, in 2022. His research has primarily been on South Asian primates in peninsular India and in the Nicobar Islands. His research interests are highly diverse, encompassing both basic and applied components. Basic research spans ecology, behavior, and cognition in primatology, while applied aspects focus on biodiversity conservation and the mitigation of human-monkey hostilities. Within comparative evolutionary thanatology, his interests lie in phylogenetic comparisons and inter-individual (within-species) variability in thanatological responses.

James Munyawera

James Munyawera

USA

James Munyawera joined the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund as a research assistant, where he contributed to long-term behavioral monitoring of mountain gorillas, anti-poaching efforts, and community-based conservation initiatives. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Oregon, focusing on mountain gorilla behavior, health, and evolution, with an emphasis on the links between behavior, ecology, and microbial communities. Using more than two decades of long-term field data, he recently helped lead the largest quantitative study of infant corpse carrying in wild mountain gorillas, providing new insights into the evolution of social bonds, emotional behavior, and responses to death in great apes. His broader research aims to improve understanding of primate health and inform conservation strategies for endangered mountain gorillas.

Abigail McClain

George Washington University

USA

Abigail McClain is a behavioral ecologist interested in how death and loss in social groups can inform what we know about social bonds in nonhuman species. Her current work examines how female chimpanzees adjust their ranging and social behavior following the loss of bond partners, finding that the strength of the prior relationship shapes whether survivors withdraw socially or compensate through increased sociality. She is finishing her Ph.D. at George Washington University’s Primate Behavioral Ecology lab in Washington, DC and often in the field at Gombe National Park, Tanzania collecting and analyzing geospatial and behavioral data from the world’s longest running great ape dataset.