About me
I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Primatology and Wildlife Research at Kyoto University. I hold an MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an MSc in Primate Conservation from Oxford Brookes University, and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam.
My work lies at an intersection. As a primatologists, I am particularly interested in langurs (Trachypithecus spp.)—leaf-eating monkeys of Southeast Asia whose social lives and cognition remain comparatively understudied relative to many other primates. These elusive primates are known for their striking bright orange infants and high levels of allomothering, in which individuals handle and care for each other’s young. My current research focuses on social interactions surrounding infants, caregiving, communication, and social coordination in langurs.
More broadly, I am interested in connecting the scientific study of animal behavior and minds with developments in the humanities and social sciences often referred to as the “animal turn.” In my theoretical work, I draw from philosophy, ethology, anthropology, and conservation to explore how we study, understand, and live alongside other animals.
I advocate for a world that takes animals seriously as agents and subjects of complex lives, studies them as such, and radically acknowledges their interests, perspectives, and well-being in research, conservation, and society at large.
Alongside my academic work, I am also an illustrator and visual artist, and co-organize the Animal Philosophy Study Group of the Netherlands.
Affiliations
Matsuda lab (Dr. Ikki Matsuda), LINGlab (Dr. Erica Cartmill), Cognitive Psychology and Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) lab (Dr. Mariska Kret), GTA Animal Cognition group, A.P.P.L.E, American Society of Primatologists (ASP), Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA), Animal Philosophy Study Group of the Netherlands (Werkgroep Dierfilosofie).
Before to becoming a PhD student, I was a Fellow (2021), Storyteller (2022) and Project Coordinator (2023) at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, worked as a research assistant and workgroup teacher at Leiden University (The Netherlands), and had an alternative life as an illustrator, ghostwriter, and vegan blogger.
If I have spare time (ha), I love to draw and explore places, by foot, skates, or bicycle.
You can reach me at: brendadegroot [at] ucla.com // degroot.brenda.62w [at] st.kyoto-u.ac.jp
If you're interested, you can read the answer to the most common question I get, "Why do you study monkeys?" below.
The (St)art
I’ve always been fascinated by (read: obsessed about) animals. As a child, I spent my free time either drawing animals, reading about animals, or watching them in the garden or on TV. I wanted to know what it is like to be a bird, to be able to flying over the tree tops and though mountain ranges; or a dolphin, communicating with others through echolocation (did you know dolphins can project images in each other’s minds? It’s wild!).
Unfortunately, shifting consciousness was – and still is – beyond our human capacities, so I resorted to drawing as a way of exploring other minds.
I can hear you think: “Wait – how does drawing make you explore other animals’ minds?”. I’ll try to explain by posing a question: Have you ever attempted to draw a portrait of someone? If so, you may have experienced how intimate it is to go over every detail in their face. I don’t know if it’s just me, but when drawing someone’s cheek, I cannot but “feel” a little tingle on my own cheek. This feeling-into the subject is strongest when drawing expressions. You need to feel at least slightly what your subject is feeling to be able to get the expression right on the paper.
The same goes for drawing animals, whether it be live or from imagination. You have to empathize with your subject if you want to accurately depict them. Through drawing animal bodies, I got to know these bodies better. And by imagining their perspective of the world, I felt I could come a bit closer to knowing what it is like to be them.
Painting at the Animal Rights March 2019
Now, imagination is not a valid instrument for gaining knowledge. We have waved goodbye to arm-chair philosophy as an epistemic method a long time ago. To attain knowledge of the world, we have to go out there, see and experience for ourselves, and learn from those who did before us. That is how I ended up in university, to study animals’ minds and lives.
Chasing monkeys
I did my undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam, where I studied Psychology, with a major in Social Psychology. It was fascinating to learn what drives humans in how they behave, think and feel, and I loved every bit of my study. Yet, the absence of other animals in psychological theory and practice during my education struck me. Other animals also had experiences, brains and behaviour – where were they? I devoted as much coursework as I could on the psychology of nonhuman animals, and wrote my bachelor thesis on empathy in different primate taxa. The Honours program made me fall in love with philosophy of mind, and for a good while I was obsessed with finding a solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness. I didn’t find it, obviously, and my current thought on the matter (pun intended) is that we humans lack the cognitive capacity to understand how neural processes create a consciousness experience–much like a cat lacks the cognitive capacity to understand algebra. But please, someone, do falsify this idea.
After obtaining my BSc, I volunteered at Stichting AAP for a year as an animal caretaker (Spain) and observation assistant (The Netherlands), before I got accepted into the MSc Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University. Here I specialised in Asian colobines, whose gentle nature struck me as so different from the strict hierarchical societies of the pig-tailed and long-tailed macaques, Hamadryas baboons and chimpanzees I knew from my internship time. Still very little is known about the behaviour and minds of colobines. As folivorous (leaf-eating) monkeys, colobines spend most of their days foraging and digesting. Compared to frugivorous primates, there is not much drama going on, which made them to be a bit of a forgotten primate group in behavioural research. So for my final project, I decided to study the behaviour repertoire of the Germain’s Langur (Trachypithecus germaini). I also carried out a conservation education program with a complimentary children’s book to help protect Cambodia’s primates.
Since no one in my extended family went to university, a PhD was not on my radar when I graduated. In the years that followed, I became a freelance writer and illustrator, and worked with various animal welfare and nature conservation NGO’s around the globe. In my spare time I launched Vegan Monkey, a blog to inspire people to go vegan, and I founded a small vegan clothing company to help spread the word (clothing makes you a walking billboard if you want to). The articles and recipes still exist on my website today. I highly recommend the avotella.
PhD journey
I first met my future supervisor at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, an interdisciplinary program bringing together researchers working on animal minds, cognition, and behavior. Inspired by our conversations while I was a project assistant for DISI, I applied to the Anthropology program at UCLA, where she was teaching at the time, and was accepted in 2023. However, life does not always unfold according to plan. Shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, my supervisor accepted a position at another university. Since this happened so early in my PhD, I reconsidered what would be the best path forward, and decided to apply to Kyoto University.
During my time at UCLA, I had become increasingly interested in Japanese primatology, and its close attention to individual animals and their social relationships. These approaches strongly resonated with my own approach and interests. In summer 2024, I was a visiting student at Kyoto University’s Wildlife Research Center, and conducted a pilot study on langurs in Vietnam. I worked with Professor Ikki Matsuda, one of the few primatologists in the world who study colobines. The WRC and my hostprofessor turned out to be an incredibly strong fit for my work, and so I applied for a Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship, which I was so fortunate to receive. Before leaving UCLA, I wrote a master thesis using my pilot study data, and in 2025, I moved to Kyoto, where I currently .
Animal ethics and the Anthropocene
In a perfect world, I’d study primates and call it a life. But we’re not living in a perfect world–far from it. In the reality of the Anthropocene, wild animals’ homes and communities are violently destroyed. Besides my passion for knowing animals, I also feel it is my duty to help protect their rights, lives, and habitats. Animals are conscious, sentient beings with interests, agency and intrinsic value, and therefore moral standing and rights. Sadly, humanity at large doesn’t fully recognise or acknowledge these givens. We use, abuse and kill animals, often for nothing more than our own pleasures and conveniences. Anthropocentrism, speciesism, and human privilege are the root causes of the suffering of millions of animals each day. To me, it’s not more than logical and compassionate to help change this.
Get in touch
You can reach me by email at brendadegroot [at] ucla [dot] edu.
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