Isabel Behncke
Chilean primatologist
Isabel Behncke Izquierdo is a field ethologist who studies animal behaviour to understand other animals. Originally from Chile, she is a primatologist, a pioneer adventurer-scientist and the first South American in following great apes in the wild.
Behncke is currently director of the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), and advisor to the Chilean government, working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation and knowledge as a member of the National Council of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation for Development (CTCI), of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation of Chile
She is a board member of the PERC research institute, which is dedicated to promoting environmental conservation, Gruter Institute research fellow, researcher at the Social Complexity Research Center, Faculty of Government, Universidad del Desarrollo, and Member of the conservation area team at Estancia Cerro Guido in Chilean Patagonia.
Education
Behncke has a BSc in Zoology and an MSc in Wildlife Conservation from University College London, an MPhil in Human Evolution from Cambridge and a DPhil in Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford.
Career
She walked more than 3,000 km following wild bonobos (Pan paniscus) in the Congo jungle. Her PhD for Oxford University was the first comprehensive study of play behaviour in wild bonobos known to science.
Behncke applies an evolutionary lens to derive insights into human behaviour and the modern challenges that humanity and the planet face. Her focus in studying play in non-human primates has been to shed light on the role of play in our own development, as humans are one of the few species that play during adulthood. For Behncke, play is at the root of creativity, social bonding and healthy development.
As of 2019 she is an Academic Collaborator of the Research Centre in Social Complexity (CICS) in Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile; a Fellow of the Bay Area-based Gruter Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Human Behavior & Institutions; and Visiting Researcher at Robin Dunbar's Social Neuroscience Evolutionary Research Group (SNRG) at University of Oxford.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isabel Behncke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.