Marlen Fröhlich is a primatologist studying the communicative behaviour of great apes, with the aim of better understanding the socio-cognitive basis and evolution of human language. With a focus on communicative development, multimodality and plasticity, she has spent the last decade conducting research on chimpanzees, bonobos, Bornean and Sumatran orangutans at multiple field sites, allowing her to disentangle species-related from environmental sources of variation. She was also one of the first comparative researchers to use an integrated multimodal approach, combining gestures, facial expressions and vocalisations. In her doctoral research on wild chimpanzees and bonobos, she focused mainly on cognitive questions about communicative behaviour derived from comparative psychology. In contrast, her more recent work on orangutan communication in the wild and in captivity has allowed her to address functional questions about the adaptive value of communicative behaviour, derived from behavioural ecology. As both types of questions are essential to a full understanding of the evolution of human language, she has often adopted interdisciplinary approaches.

After completing her Ph.D. and a short postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in 2016, she joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich for an independent postdoctoral research project. In January 2022, she returned to Germany to take up a research and teaching position at the University of Tübingen. In April 2022, she was awarded one of the last thirteen Freigeist Fellowships of the Volkswagen Foundation for her interdisciplinary research project "Pathways to language: The role of communicative plasticity in joint action coordination".