About us
The project is led by Dr Mathilde Tahar, with Dr Alecia Carter providing supervision and guidance.
The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2023-320), and is hosted by the Department of Anthropology of University College London. Some research will be conducted place in the Tsaobis Nature Park, as the projected is embedded in the Tsaobis Baboon Project.
Theis research will run from May 2024 to May 2027.
The Team
Dr Mathilde Tahar, a philosopher, and Dr Alecia Carter, a biologist, are both enthusiastic about cross-disciplinary research and animal behaviour.
They are committed to navigating the complexities of the academic landscape while preserving intellectual rigour and ethical work relationships.
DrMathilde Tahar
Research Fellow
Mathilde Tahar holds a PhD in philosophy of biology. Both trained in philosophy and in biology, she specialises in the epistemology of the theory of evolution and in animal agency (and in Henri Bergson, but that is — though not entirely* —unrelated). After working on the use of teleology in evolutionary theory, she now focuses on the role played by non-human agents in ecology and evolution.
* If you're curious about the connection between Henri Bergson and evolutionary theory/animal behaviour, you can read this (beware, this one is in French), or this (this one is not). And of course, you can also ordee her book (actually, preferably not on Amazon, but from your local philosophy bookshop).
Dr Alecia Carter
Associate Professor
Alecia Carter is an Associate Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, UCL. Her current research investigates
(1) how primates respond to the deaths of others and what this can tell us about the evolution of cognition and emotion and
(2) how individuals access information to make decisions. In particular, she studies how individuals use their social environment to access information, and how their phenotype, their individual characteristics, may limit their use of that information.