Julia Espinosa, Ph.D.

Hello! I am a Postdoctoral Researcher affiliated with York University's Department of Psychology and Connected Minds Program, and Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. I am a comparative psychologist and use tools from cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, ethology, and philosophy of science to understand how dogs think and feel. At York, I collaborate with an international team of researchers across Canada, Germany, and India to investigate the collective behaviour and social ecology of free-roaming dogs (i.e., dogs without designated caregivers). At Harvard, I am affiliated with Dr. Erin Hecht's Evolutionary Neuroscience Lab and am a member of the Canine Brains Project, where we investigate the individual differences shaping dog personality and behaviour. These lines of inquiry converge to help us understand the evolution and development of dog behaviour at multiple levels of organization: 1) as a function of the cultural context and social norms in the Global North vs South, and 2) at the individual level as a result of natural and artificial selection pressures.