Mason Youngblood is a behavioral scientist and sound artist at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, where he investigates the cultural evolution of communication, cognition, and creativity in both human and non-human animals. His recent research—published in journals like Science and featured by National Geographic and Scientific American—uses computational modeling to reveal the structural complexity and cultural richness of bird and whale songs. Drawing on over a decade of experience in electronic music production and DJing, Youngblood merges generative composition with scientific data to create immersive audio installations. His current work reconstructs the lost voices of endangered and extinct species, inviting audiences to inhabit non-human perspectives and experience the disappearing cultural traditions of the more-than-human world.

Simon Townsend is a professor at the University of Zurich, where he leads the Comparative Communication and Cognition Group. His research focuses mainly on questions related to aspects of competition and cooperation within and between groups. He makes use of our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees as referential models, to infer about potential selective pressures and existing predisposition in our evolutionary past. He is particularly interested in the fascinating social system of bonobos and the question, what selection pressures were responsible to differentiate this species from the better-known chimpanzees. His research lab uses a comparative approach, working with data from wild populations to get an integral understanding of a wide range of social traits. In the beginning of 2016, he established a new bonobo research site at Kokolopori in collaboration with Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) and Vie Sauvage. Through insights from this new site they anticipate contributing to a better understanding of behavioural diversity within bonobos. Currently they follow daily three habituated neighboring bonobo groups and will gain new insights about mechanisms of intergroup tolerance by combining behavioural and endocrinological data.

Simon received his bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2005. He then moved to Scotland to pursue a PhD under Swiss primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler in the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, where he focused on the vocal communication of wild chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest.

In 2008, he took up a postdoctoral position with Marta Manser at the University of Zurich (UZH), studying meerkat vocal communication and cognition at the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa. In 2015, he returned to the UK as an Assistant Professor in Language and Learning in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick. In 2017, he accepted a Swiss National Science Foundation–funded Research Professorship in the Department of Comparative Linguistics at UZH.

Most recently, he moved to the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at UZH, where he remains an Associate Professor, leading a research group investigating the evolutionary origins of human language.