Katherine A. Cronin, Ph.D.

Education

• Ph.D. – Proximate influences on cooperative behavior in cotton-top tamarins: Economic, social and endocrine. University of Wisconsin
• B.S. – Zoology, University of Wisconsin

Areas of Expertise

• Primate behavior
• Primate social cognition
• Comparative psychology
• Animal welfare

About Katherine Cronin:

Katherine joined Lincoln Park Zoo in 2014 to lead a research program at the new Regenstein Macaque Forest, an exhibit specially designed to study the behavior and cognition of Japanese macaques. The work at Regenstein Macaque Forest will use touch-screen computers, behavioral monitoring and in-exhibit experiments to build our understanding of these complex animals.

Katherine first began studying primates at the University of Wisconsin, where she focused on cotton-top tamarins, a small monkey species that lives in tight-knit family groups. These monkeys caught her interest because all family members work together to raise their infants, and she wanted to know whether this special adaptation meant they would cooperate in other contexts as well. This sparked a line of research investigating the cooperative problem solving of primate species with very different social dynamics, and over the last 10 years Katherine has studied cooperation in many species including tamarins, bonobos, chimpanzees and humans. Broadly speaking, she is trying to understand what circumstances allow cooperation to flourish.

During the five years prior to her arrival at Lincoln Park Zoo, Katherine was a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands. She also spent much of her time in Africa at a chimpanzee sanctuary studying the behavior of four chimpanzees communities at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. There, Katherine and colleagues continued to discover cultural differences across these groups, ranging from group-specific ways of grooming to differences in how tolerant their communities are. By working together with local Zambian researchers, she and colleagues developed a long-term ongoing video-monitoring system that documents the behavior of all the groups daily—just like Fisher Center researchers monitor the behavior of the apes in Regenstein Center for African Apes and the Japanese macaques in Regenstein Macaque Forest.

Katherine also strives to understand the experience of animals living in non-wild settings, and studies what people can do to improve the quality of life of animals in their care. Her research into animal welfare integrates the study of hormonal, behavioral and emotional changes that occur in animals.