The Nature of Adolescence: A Chimpanzee Perspective

Rachna Reddy studies social relationships formed by our closest living relatives—bonobos and chimpanzees—to deepen evolutionary understanding of our own. As a Radcliffe fellow, Reddy will ask why adolescence is simultaneously a period of immense vulnerability and of resilience in the human life course, through new cross-species empirical research that integrates perspectives from biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience and through writing a coming-of-age novel inspired by the real lives of her wild chimpanzee study subjects, whom she has observed for more than a decade.