Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Paola Cerrito
2022-2023
Discipline(s)
Biology; Neuroscience and cognitive science; Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Health; Identity
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Dr. Paola Cerrito (born 1990 in Rome, Italy) is a biological anthropologist. Her research focuses on the selective pressures and proximal mechanisms that have shaped and allowed for the evolution of our peculiar life history and cooperative breeding behavior. This kind of research requires contributions from a variety of disciplines such as hominin paleobiology, primate comparative neurobiology and communication, or life history theory.
Paola received her PhD in 2022 from New York University. In her doctoral thesis, she investigated the ways in which metabolically significant events such as reproduction, menopause and lifestyle changes are permanently recorded in the skeleton, which acts as a biological archive of a person’s life. Her research has been funded by several agencies, including the National Science Foundation (USA) and has been featured by numerous news outlets, e.g. CNN, The Guardian or Slate. At New York University she taught undergraduate courses in Human Evolution in addition to carrying out outreach activities at several science institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History.
Since August 2023, Paola has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Zurich.
Research Project
Time to Socialize: Does the Timing of Brain Development Predict Prosocial and Play Behavior?
Paola Cerrito’s fellowship project at the Collegium took a comparative approach to investigate the presence of shared neurobiological traits that could help explain the high levels of sociality observed in some primates—including humans.
Based on previous work on humans and naked mole rats, Paola hypothesized that the timing of brain development is critical for the development of prosocial traits. Neural connectivity occurs while the infant is cared for by—and establishes effective communication with—a plurality of individuals including caregivers and play partners. Paola aimed to test her hypothesis by characterizing brain development in marmosets, a prosocial South American monkey species. She examined whether delayed and prolonged brain formation coupled with extensive shared infant care and social play in marmosets allowed the development of marked social behaviors.
Research Interests:
neurobiological traits ; brain development