Dorothy L. Cheney
University of Pennsylvania
August 24, 1950 - November 9, 2018
|
Scientific Discipline: Anthropology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
|
Dorothy Cheney studied the behavior, communication, and social cognition of non-human primates, with the aim of understanding the evolutionary antecedents of the human mind. Cheney was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1950. She graduated with a BA from Wellesley College in 1972 and with a PhD in animal behavior from the University of Cambridge in 1977. She was a postdoctoral fellow in animal behavior at the Rockefeller University before moving to UCLA in 1981. She has been a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 1986. Together with her husband, Robert Seyfarth, Cheney is the author of two books: "How Monkeys See The World" (1990) and "Baboon Metaphysics" (2007). Cheney is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 2013.
