Severine Hex

Severine Hex is a comparative ethologist and behavioral ecologist who studies how animals living in complex societies navigate the challenges of their social worlds. Within a society, individuals deploy different social strategies depending upon their own characteristics, which may change across their lifespan, as well as in response to the social and physical environment in which they are embedded. By investigating patterns of social behavior at the individual and population level, and identifying the dimensions along which different social strategies can be characterized, she seeks to determine the ways in which social tools such as multimodal communication, social cognition, and social bonds are leveraged to solve specific social challenges, and how this influences the evolution of different behavioral and communicative strategies. She has explored these questions in a range of species, including songbirds, bats, zebras, non-human primates, and humans, and her work has appeared in journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Nature Communications, Communications Biology, the American Naturalist, and Animal Behaviour. Her current work using the three extant zebra species seeks to investigate the relationship between the evolution of social and communicative complexity by combining field-based, behavioral observations with cutting edge implementations of network theory. Hex received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University as a College Scholar and Rawlings Presidential Research Scholar, and completed her NSF-GRFP sponsored Ph.D in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.