Katherine A. Cronin, Ph.D.

Education

• Ph.D. – Psychology, University of Wisconsin
• B.S. – Zoology, University of Wisconsin

Areas of Expertise

• Animal welfare
• Applied animal behavior
• Primate behavior and cognition

About Katherine Cronin:

Katie leads Lincoln Park Zoo's Animal Welfare Science Program, a program in which scientists and animal care staff work together to evaluate and enhance the well-being of animals in zoos and promote positive animal welfare. Katie strives to understand the experience of animals living in non-wild settings and studies what caretakers can do to improve the quality of life of animals in human care. Her research into animal welfare integrates the study of hormonal, behavioral and emotional changes that occur in animals, and is increasingly geared toward practical, actionable insights. Her team oversees the development of the ZooMonitor app, a web-based tool to measure behavior and infer the welfare of animals, and the volunteer-based program that uses this app at Lincoln Park Zoo daily to monitor the behavior of Lincoln Park Zoo animals.

Prior to her arrival at Lincoln Park Zoo, Katie was a Staff Scientist at the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands for five years. She spent much of her time in Africa at a chimpanzee sanctuary, the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. Working together with local Zambian researchers, she and colleagues developed a long-term behavioral monitoring system that documents the behavior of all the groups daily to better understand their behavior and promote their welfare. She joined the scientific staff at Lincoln Park Zoo in 2014 eager to work alongside practical scientists dedicated to improving welfare of animals in human care, and began her research with Japanese macaques in Regenstein Macaque Forest as part of the Fisher Center.

Katie advises research interns, undergraduate and graduate students in projects in applied animal behavior and welfare. She is currently appointed as a faculty member of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago.