Karlijn van Heijst is a research assistant in the Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) group of Prof. dr. Mariska Kret.

More information about Karlijn van Heijst

Short CV

Karlijn van Heijst is a research assistant in the Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) group of Prof. dr. Mariska Kret. After completing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences at Radboud University Nijmegen and a master’s degree in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, she switched focus to studying non-human animal behavior. This switch was driven by a deep curiosity and passion to better understand non-human animals. Her master’s literature thesis, for which she compared two major emotion theories on their evolutionary basis, sparked her fascination with non-human animal emotion – both to better understand the role emotions play in their lives and to inform us about how emotions may have evolved in humans. She completed a graduate internship in the CoPAN group, during which she assisted with ongoing research with zoo-housed orangutans, and worked as a research assistant at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University, running a playback experiment with zoo-housed bonobos in Germany. She then spent a year in the field observing wild Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia as a field research assistant at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. After coming back from Indonesia, she rejoined the CoPAN group as a research assistant to study emotional attention bias in zoo-housed orangutans, while also assisting with other research projects and managing data collection in collaborating zoos. She aims to pursue a PhD in the field of animal emotion, social behavior, and/or communication.