© Stephanie Mercier
Principal investigator
Dr. Sofia Forss - Homepage: www.sofiaforss.com/
On-site Manager
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Sofia is an evolutionary biologist specialised on comparative cognition and animal behaviour. She holds a PhD in Natural Sciences, with specialisation in Evolutionary Anthropology (University of Zurich, Switzerland). She has worked with multiple primate species and expanded her scientific interests beyond primates to the broader field of Animal Behaviour, currently running two field projects in South Africa: the Urban Vervet Project and the Mongoose Cognition Project. In her research, she and her team, study the interlink between socio-ecological factors, intrinsic motivation, and learning. She is especially interested in uncovering evolutionary explanations for variation in cognitive and behavioural flexible phenotypes and how they relate to biological adaptations. The colonisation of urban habitats presents a timely evolutionary transition for many wild animals that she found intriguing because it presents interesting avenues for the field of behavioural ecology, animal cognition as well as animal welfare. Given that vervet monkeys are one of a few primate species that have successfully nuanced into anthropogenic landscapes, they provide her team the excellent opportunity to study the interplay between environmental changes, socio-ecology and cognitive abilities.
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His long-term passion for social mammals led him to embark on this new journey at UVP. As a wildlife ecologist, Tobias has studied herpetofauna and mammal sociality. He is particularly excited about exploring how group composition, dynamics and relatedness affect cooperation in social mammals inhabiting complex landscapes. His PhD was on the population dynamics and genetics of social mole-rats in and around Pretoria. Before becoming the new on-site manager, he studied whether morphology affects reproductive success in German bats. Starting in December, he will lead the on-site training and communication activities. This involves regular communications with the research team and the environmental team, and residents in Simbithi. In addition, Tobias will contribute to data collection, write scientific articles and co-supervise students.
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Data manager
Dr. Stephanie mercIer
After a decade working with wild vervet monkeys in KZN and three years developing the UVP field site in Simbithi, Stef has moved into a new role as Data Manager for UVP, while also serving as a project coordinator for SINERGIA, a collaborative effort across multiple research teams. She maintains standardised, comparable datasets and continues to clean, organise, and analyse UVP data, working closely with colleagues from the Universities of Zürich and Lausanne, UKZN, the Simbithi environmental team, as well as students and residents. Stef’s work now involves three study sites: UVP (semi-urban), IVP (wild), and CROW (captive), as the SINERGIA project investigates how monkeys’ diets, including human foods, influence their health and fitness. Drawing on her long-term experience, she continues to contribute to data collection, supervise students, and collaborate on scientific publications, hoping to observe vervet monkeys’ natural use of plants with potential medicinal properties that may one day benefit humans too.
Outreach Officer
Emma Chen
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Emma holds a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Her thesis focused on understanding the influence of early life experiences on the current display of abnormal behaviours in rescued chimpanzees at the MONA Sanctuary in Spain. Starting in September 2024, Emma joined the UVP team to research how the perception of 'joy' and 'fear' in semi-urban vervet monkeys affects their ranging pattern. Passionate about animal behaviour and cognition, Emma is also dedicated to journalism and science communication, aiming to make science accessible and engaging to a broader audience. Having a background as a writer and editor for online and physical newspapers, she currently contributes to the UVP’s outreach efforts, coordinating social media communications, assisting with the monthly newsletters, and supporting website updates.
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Master students
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Yke Snijder
MSc student, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Yke is a MSc student in Environmental Biology at Utrecht University. He has a broad interest in animal cognition and behaviour. Previously, he has worked on projects concerning foraging cognition in zoo-housed mandrills and chimpanzees in ARTIS Amsterdam Zoo, as well as the effect of breeding restrictions on welfare and social dynamics in zoo-housed Barbary macaques across several Dutch zoos. Yke joined the UVP to study the relationship between social dynamics and “raiding” or opportunistic foraging on anthropogenic foods that the urbanised monkeys at Simbithi regularly engage in. The project aims to understand both how individuality shape opportunistic feeding behaviour and to characterize the social tolerance and relationships impacting these feeding events. |
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Valeria Simeonova
MSc student, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Valeria recently completed her MSc in Environmental Biology at Utrecht University with a project conducted at UVP. In her MSc with us, Valeria investigates personality in vervet monkeys, more specifically individual variation in risk-taking. To do so she combines data from a predator-exposure experiment with extensive and detailed observational data on a variety of contexts where risk-taking personality is predicted to affect behaviours in the urban landscape. |
Vera Konst
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MSc student, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Vera is currently a second-year MSc student of Biological Sciences: Evolution of Behavior and Mind at the University of Amsterdam. With a background in neuroscience, Vera previously compared neural connections in the primate and carnivoran brain, to better understand the evolution of their social cognition. Now, at UVP, she is looking at play behavior, aiming to describe and understand the role of play in the vervet monkeys' population in Simbithi. |
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Tobias Etter
MSc student, Biodiversity program, University of Zurich, Switzerland Tobias has a BSc in Biology at the Zurich University and joined Dr. Forss local team in 2025. In 2026 he will undertake his MSc thesis work at the UVP and join the onsite team at Simbithi. In his thesis Tobias will research vervet monkeys’ risk-perception when encountering evolutionary novel predators like domestic dogs. Tobias will apply an experimental approach to disentangle what risk labels urbanised populations take into consideration when responding to potential predators. |
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Emma Chen
MSc student, Biodiversity program, University of Zurich, Switzerland Emma first joined the UVP in 2024 as a field volunteer/research assistant. She then decided to do a MSc in Forss’ group at the UZH and will use her extensive knowledge and collected data at UVP to conduct her thesis work, within the University’s Biodiversity program. In her thesis work, she will explore how spatial range use relates to perception and cognitive capacities in semi-urban vervets, with a particular focus on how “joyful” events and pleasure impacts ranging patterns. She will be under the supervision of Dr. Forss and Dr. Robira. |
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RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
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Linda Prince Lukhele
RA Sinergia project, South Africa Prince is a former “Ichthyoparasitologist” holding an MSc Degree in Zoology from the University of Limpopo. He started to work with primates, and vervet monkeys first as a field assistant at the Inkawu Vervet Project (IVP) located at the Mawana Game reserve between 2024 and 2025. In November 2025, Prince joined the UVP as a field assistant contributing to our long-term data collection and with a special task to process all the faecal samples for dietary analyses within the Sinergia project UVP is taking part of. |
Dr. George Hodgson
George is an ethologist interested in sociality and strategic interaction decision-making by individuals. Having graduated in 2025 with a PhD investigating the social behaviour of feral cattle (Bos taurus) in Hong Kong, George will join the UVP project in 2026 onsite in Simbithi, helping collect long-term data and investigating ungulate-primate inter-species interactions. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Zoology BSc in 2019, and has worked for the Kalahari Molerat Project at the Kalahari Research Centre. Alongside ungulate affiliation and dominance, George is interested in social cognition, how individuals perceive one another, and social network analysis.
George is an ethologist interested in sociality and strategic interaction decision-making by individuals. Having graduated in 2025 with a PhD investigating the social behaviour of feral cattle (Bos taurus) in Hong Kong, George will join the UVP project in 2026 onsite in Simbithi, helping collect long-term data and investigating ungulate-primate inter-species interactions. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Zoology BSc in 2019, and has worked for the Kalahari Molerat Project at the Kalahari Research Centre. Alongside ungulate affiliation and dominance, George is interested in social cognition, how individuals perceive one another, and social network analysis.
Associate researchers
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Dr. Camilla Cenni Postdoctoral researcher & lecturer, University of Mannheim, Germany Camilla is an ethologist primarily interested in how individual differences shape group traditions and drive innovation across species and socio-ecologies. At UVP, she has conducted open diffusion experiments to explore which individual traits predict innovation and social learning in urban vervet monkeys. In her work, she combines observational methods, (field) experiments, and agent-based models to better understand the cognitive and social dynamics of behaviour. |
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Dr. Benjamin Robira Postdoctoral researcher, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Benjamin is a behavioural ecologist, mainly interested in understanding the causes and consequences of animal cognition, which he studies through the movement and navigation perspective. He is specialised in the processing and analysis of movement and behavioural data, as well as statistical, mechanistic and agent-based modelling. In 2024 to 2025 he did a 1.5-year postdoc in the Forss group at UZH and thereafter received a Veni Grant to continue his research at the University of Amsterdam. |
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Durr-E-Ajam Riaz & Dr. Lukas Schad
Fullbright grantee, USA Durré is a behavioral biologist from New York, USA, and holds a MSc degree in Behavioral Biology from the University of Göttingen, Germany. For her MSc thesis, she measured and validated salivary biomarkers of welfare in zoo-housed bonobos. During her studies, she gained two years of research experience at the German Primate Center, where she annotated acoustic recordings of vervet alarm calls and examined inter-individual variation in call production. Supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Durré joined the UVP in 2024 with a research focus on vocal flexibility in the alarm calling behavior of urban vervet monkeys in an anthropogenic environment. Lukas accompanied Durre on this project as a post-doctoral researcher who did his PhD on wild vervet monkeys at the Inkawu Vervet Project. |
Environmental team & Simbithi collaborators
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Ayanda Duma
Environmental manager |
Margi Lilienfeld
Environmental advisor |
Derrick Lilienfeld
Veterinarian |
Alumni
Lindsey Ellington - From New Zealand & USA
Master student from the University of Groningen (Netherlands), she worked at UVP from November 2022 until March 2023 and replicated a study done by Sofia Forss (2021) on curiosity to compare the responses of wild, captive and semi-urban vervet monkeys. She helped habituating and worked with Acacia. |
Manon Desaivres - From France
Master student from the Sorbonne Paris Nord University, she joined UVP from January to June 2023 to study human-vervet interactions, investigating both from the monkeys' and the residents’ perspective. She helped habituated and worked with Savanna. |
Zonke Mbutho - From Eastern Cape, South Africa
Zonke, who was working with wild vervet monkeys at IVP joined UVP for two months as a field assistant (April-May 2023) before returning to IVP. She came to help us collecting data on Acacia and on all ongoing projects which passionate her: human-wildlife conflicts. |
Joey Felsch - From Switzerland
Master student from the University of Lausanne who joined UVP from July until December 2023. He investigated dietary traditions in the diet of urban vervet monkeys using molecular approaches (eDNA) thanks to the co-supervision of Luca Fumagalli & Erica van de Waal. For that, 455 faecal samples were collected at UVP during his time! While he used samples from both troops, he was following Savanna. |
Paige Barnes - From the USA
Master student from the University of Zurich, Paige joined UVP in June 2023 and stayed until January 2024. She worked with both Acacia & Savanna and ran boxes' experiments to study the effect of urbanisation on vervet cognition by replicating a social transmission test done with the wild population of IVP (Canteloup 2020). |
Adrian Mc Connell - From Switzerland
Master student from the University of Lausanne who joined UVP in July 2023 until March 2024. Using over 370h of daily focal follows from both troops, he studied how diet composition and acquisition influence vervet monkey adaptation to urbanization. Adrian was however, an expert following Acacia. |
Shiara Covenden - From KZN, South Africa
Shiara is a South African volunteer from Umhlanga, who helped us few days a week for 3 months (January-March 2024). While she learnt a lot on monkeys' behaviour and enjoyed interacting with the residents, she also helped habituating a third troop that we will start studying: the Pink troop! |
Natacha Bande - From France
French master’s student in the ecology, ethology, and ecophysiology program at the University of Strasbourg, she joined UVP from January to July 2024 to study the relationships between vervet monkeys and domesticated dogs from Simbithi. She was the main researcher of the Savanna troop. |
Oceane Lusher - From Switzerland
Swiss master's student in behaviour, evolution and conservation with the University of Lausanne, she joined UVP from March to September 2024 to study innovative behaviours in vervet monkeys by conducting some string-pulling experiments. She was the main researcher of the Acacia troop. |
Melissa Ardila - From Columbia
Melissa is a biologist interested in urban ecology and the effects human activities have on animal behaviour. Joining UVP from March until September 2024, she was the main researcher of Pink and collected an impressive amount of focal data! She also analyzed some interesting data on the relationships between vervet monkeys and the antelopes in Simbithi. 
Clementine Serre - From France Clementine is passionate about animal minds and the ethics of human–animal relationships. She previously worked with macaques, mandrills, and meerkats in the Kalahari. She joined UVP from July to December 2025 to explore cognition in urban-adapted vervet monkeys. |
Dr. Ntaki Senoge - From South Africa
From August 2024 to May 2025, Ntaki coordinated the collection of vervet monkey faecal samples at UVP (expert in Savanna) to document their plant-based diet. His work, conducted as part of a SINERGIA project involving Profs. Erica van de Waal and Colleen Downs, lays the groundwork for future analyses exploring how diet quality influences life history in Simbithi’s semi-urban population, and sheds light on vervet microbiomes. |
Helen Puschmann - From Germany
Helen is a MSc student in psychology from the University of Mannheim, Germany. In June 2025, she joined UVP to explore the play behaviour of vervet monkeys (focusing on Pink) and how it is influenced by anthropogenic habitats. However, for personal reasons, Helen, had to end her study and stay in South Africa early. |
