Affiliation: University of Lethbridge, Department of Psychology

Richard Weil is a PhD student who has a passion for animal behaviour and cognition studies in the wild specifically. He started off completing his BSc and MSc at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has worked on projects which focused on ecology, behaviour, and cognition of free-living animals in South Africa. He has worked with free-living animals like urban black-backed jackals, arid adapted African striped mice, and meerkats.

He is currently completing his PhD in Evolution and Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He is investigating the proximate and ultimate causes of material culture in non-human primates, specifically stone handling behaviour (a non-instrumental form of culturally maintained object manipulation) and tool use exhibited by free-ranging populations of macaques.