I am a PhD student, and my research focuses on social ageing, that is, how social relationships change with age. To investigate this, I analyze twelve years of individual-level data collected by the Mandrillus Project, which monitors a group of wild mandrills in Gabon. By combining social network analyses and agent-based models, my PhD aims to:
1. Characterize patterns of social ageing in mandrills, a highly social primate species, across several behavioral dimensions: grooming, spatial proximity, affiliative behaviors, and agonistic behaviors.
2. Test whether these patterns can be explained by changes in the availability of kin partners throughout the life course.
3. Assess their impact on individual fitness.