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Biographical sketch

Ansgar is a behavioral scientist with key contributions in fields from evolutionary behavioral science to language acquisition to memory processes to social behavior. He has experience with populations from non-human primates to human infants and adults, using a variety of behavioral assays, statistical techniques and computational models.

Ansgar is passionate about a simple question: Why and how do seemingly simple cognitive mechanisms shared with other animals shape human-specific traits such as language?

Ansgar is an academic at City, University of London. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, a generalist engineer degree from the Ecole polytechnique in France, and an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Essen, Germany.

Prior to his current position, Ansgar worked at some of the foremost institutions, including the Center of Brain and Cognition of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, the Potter lab at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory and the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University and the Language, Cognition and Development Laboratory at SISSA in Trieste, Italy.