Deborah Galeone is a PhD student in the Palaeoanthropology section at the University of Tübingen. After completing her Bachelor's degree in Animal Management and Welfare, she moved to Turin to attend a Master's Degree in Evolution of Animal and Human Behavior. Her MSc thesis focused on the vocal communication of wild orang-utans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii), for which she spent several months in Borneo collecting data.
From 2021, she worked in Gabon for the Loango Gorilla Project, first as a research assistant and later as the assistant project manager. There, she focused on collecting behavioral and ecological data of wild lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), on gorillas’ habituation, as well as on data, staff, and camp management.
She returned to Europe to be part of the research group “Pathways to Language” which aims to provide insights into human language evolution and plasticity through the comparative study of communication over joint actions in great apes. The goal of her PhD project is to assess the individual variation and plasticity in communicative interactions of wild and zoo-housed orang-utans.