Karlijn van Heijst is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) lab of Prof. dr. Mariska Kret. Her PhD project focuses on the role of expressions of emotion in cooperation in great apes.

More information about Karlijn van Heijst

Short CV

After completing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences at Radboud University Nijmegen and a master’s degree in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, she switched focus to studying non-human animal behavior. This switch was driven by a deep curiosity and passion to better understand non-human animals. Her master’s literature thesis, for which she compared two major emotion theories on their evolutionary basis, sparked her fascination with non-human animal emotion – both to better understand the role emotions play in their lives and to inform us about how emotions may have evolved in humans. She completed a graduate internship in the CoPAN lab, during which she assisted with ongoing research with zoo-housed orangutans, and worked as a research assistant at the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University, running a playback experiment with zoo-housed bonobos in Germany. She then spent a year in the field observing wild Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia as a field research assistant at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. After coming back from Indonesia, she rejoined the CoPAN lab as a research assistant, where she started her PhD project in April 2025.

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