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, I switched focus to studying non-human animal behavior. This switch was driven by a deep curiosity and passion to better understand non-human animals. My master’s literature thesis, for which I compared two major emotion theories on their evolutionary basis, sparked my 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. After a graduate internship in the CoPAN group, during which I assisted with ongoing research with zoo-housed orangutans, as a research assistant at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University I ran a playback experiment with zoo-housed bonobos in Germany. I 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 I came back from Indonesia, I rejoined the CoPAN group in April 2024 as a research assistant to study emotional attention bias in zoo-housed orangutans. In April 2025 I started my PhD project, which will focus on emotion perception and the role of expressions of emotion in cooperation in great apes.