Dr. Margaret Crofoot is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary anthropologist interested in the evolution of social complexity. In her research, she combines observational methods and field-based experiments with emerging remote sensing technology, to reveal how group-living animals overcome conflicts of interest to achieve shared goals. She is particularly interested in how group-level traits emerge and the ways in which they shape the collective ecology of animals’ societies. Meg studied Human Biology at Stanford University (1997-2001) and obtained her Masters (2003) and PhD degrees (2008) in Anthropology from Harvard University. As a Postdoc she worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (2008-2013). She taught as Lecturer in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University (2009-2011) and then as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (2013-2019) at the University of California, Davis. In recognition of her scientific accomplishments, Meg has been honored with a number of awards including the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2016) and the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2018). In 2019 she became Director of the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and full Professor at the University of Konstanz (https://www.ab.mpg.de/person/99737).
