Simone Pika
ethologist
Simone Susanne Pika (née Klein) is a German ethologist and primatologist investigating the evolution and development of language, cognition and plasticity by focusing on distinct model systems such as corvids, great apes, monkeys and dolphins. Since 2017, she co-directs the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project, Loango National Park in Gabon. She is a full professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Germany.
Career
Since 2017, Pika is the head of the Comparative BioCognition group at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Germany.
In 1992, Pika did her first ethological internship with Wolfgang Wickler at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in Seewiesen, Germany. She studied biology at the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Münster. Her specialization in ethology at the Department of Behavioural Biology, University of Münster and contact with Norbert Sachser led to a diploma thesis on the social behavior of three great ape species living in the Zürich Zoologischer Garten in collaboration with August A. Anzenberger and Bob Martin from the University of Zürich. From 2000 to 2003, Pika did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, supervised by Michael Tomasello and Norbert Sachser. In her thesis, she investigated gestural communication in bonobos and gorillas in captivity. In 2006, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta in Canada to study gestural usage in bilingual humans.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simone Pika” 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.