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, 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. Her current work using zebras as a study system seeks to investigate the coevolution of social and communicative complexity by combining field-based, behavioral observations with cutting edge implementations of network theory.