Liran Samuni

Liran Samuni leads the Cooperative Cultures Reseacrh Group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is an Emmy Noether recipient and was previosuly a Group Leader at the German Primate Center (DPZ) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the department of Human Evolutionary Biology in Harvard. Samuni is a Leakey Foundation grantee and the 2021 recipient of the Gordon Getty Award. She completed her PhD in Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2019 and received her Masters in Zoology from the Tel-Aviv University in 2013. She studies the intersection between intergroup dynamics, cooperation, and culture in chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, as windows into our own evolutionary past. She approaches these questions by observing wild chimpanzees at the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire and the Moyen Bafing National Park, Guinea, and wild bonobos at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, DR Congo.