Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
Deutscher Platz 6 
04103 Leipzig 
Germany 

e-mail: cedric_girard@[>>> Please remove the brackets! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Current Research
Curriculum Vitae
Publications

I am a behavioural ecologist interested in the proximate mechanisms that shape wild animal behaviours with a particular focus on non-human primates. My research interests span a broad range of fields including social behaviour, social-cognition, endocrinology and communication. I conduct research in the field using a combination of behavioural observations, ecological measures, non-invasive endocrine sample collection, sound and video recordings and experimental approaches.

Currently, I work as part of two large projects. I investigate the behavioural, physiological and socio-cognitive costs of early life adversity, including maternal loss, in wild chimpanzees as part of Catherine Crockford’s ERC grant ‘Ape Attachment’. In parallel, and since the beginning of 2021, I took up a new post-doctoral position as part of a Max Planck collaboration, the Evolution of Brain Connectivity Project, which examines the complexity of primate vocal communication and correlates with relevant white matter tract size and projections in the brain. This project is comparative, operating at species, population, individual and ontogenetic levels.

In a previous post-doctoral position, I studied the differences in cooperation structures, social dynamics, and social cognition between our two closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. Our project highlighted novel species-level differences in social (e.g., affiliative exchange patterns and social partner selectivity) and within-group cooperation dynamics (e.g., the motivation to inform conspecifics about a danger).