Branco Weiss fellow Erica van de Waal receives substantial grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation

The Swiss National Science Foundation awarded Branco Weiss fellow Erica van de Waal with a major grant. Van de Waal’s project bears the title “Social learning rules and their adaptive function in wild vervet monkeys”. It started on May 1, 2015 and will end April 30, 2018. During this period she will receive 350’000 US-Dollars, to cover her research expenses in South Africa and to provide the salary for an additional PhD-student.

In her project, Erica van de Waal aims to gain unique insights into the mechanisms and rules underlying social learning in wild primates. Combining the results from multiple experiments and observations, her research will broaden our knowledge of social learning for behavioural phenotypes in primates, which in turn may help to better understand what makes our human culture so unique.

Erica van de Waal’s project on the Swiss National Science Foundation website