Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Tetsuro Matsuzawa is a professor at the Primate Research Institute (PRI) of Kyoto University, Japan. He is also the president of International Primatological Society. Matsuzawa studies chimpanzee intelligence both in the laboratory and in the wild. His laboratory work, known as "Ai project," focuses on the language-like skills and the concept of numbers established in a 36-year-old female chimpanzee named Ai. Ai, and her 13 year-old son, Ayumu, live in the PRI community of 14 chimpanzees as a group including 3 generations. The Ai-project started in 1978 and is one of the longest laboratory research studies on the chimpanzee mind. Matsuzawa has studied wild chimpanzees at Bossou, Guinea, West Africa, since 1986. The Bossou chimpanzees are well known to use a pair of stones as hammer and anvil to crack open oil-palm nuts. His long-term research revealed interesting topics like handedness of use of hammer, critical period of learning nut-cracking, and "education by master-apprenticeship," etc. Matsuzawa tries to synthesize the field work and the laboratory work to understand the nature of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbors. He has received several prizes including the Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor and the Jane Goodall Award. He has published many articles and books such as Chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba (Springer, 2011).