Jolinde Vlaeyen
Early-Career Fellow 2026–2027

Jolinde Vlaeyen (born 1993 in Belgium) is a behavioral biologist interested in social cognition, cooperation, and social learning in non-human animals, with a particular focus on primates and cetaceans. Jolinde is driven by a curiosity about the shared building blocks of social cognition: how individuals perceive, communicate, and coordinate with one another, and how these abilities emerge across social systems. Her research began with communication and development in primates and has since expanded into social learning and the emergence of coordinated behavior, with communication remaining a common thread throughout.

Jolinde received her PhD from Osnabrück University (DE) in 2026. In her doctoral thesis, she studied wild bonobo mother-infant communication in the Democratic Republic of Congo, investigating the development of turn-taking. Alongside this, she has also been working on wild bottlenose dolphins with the Cedar Key Dolphin Project in Florida (US). Jolinde is passionate about sharing her science with the broader public, writing articles for Conversation Africa and The Hidden Coast, and is a member of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) working group of the European Federation for Primatology.