Jennifer Vonk is a comparative cognitive psychologist, who is now full professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, U.S. She obtained her PhD from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Louisiana before accepting a position at the University of Southern Mississippi where she was a member of the Psychology department until 2011. She is known for studying a variety of cognitive processes in bears, non-human primates, and many other less studied species. She is the co-editor in Chief of Animal Behavior and Cognition, founded by Stanley Kuczaj, and serves as an associate editor on three additional journals. She directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Origins (LoCO) at Oakland University.
Alexander Weiss is a comparative and differential psychologist, and a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, U.K. He obtained his PhD from the University of Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona, and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Personality and Cognition at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland before joining the Department of Psychology in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. He is known primarily for his research on personality and subjective well-being in nonhuman primates and other animals, and for his work on personality, aging, and health in humans and other primates. He is an associate editor at Animal Behaviour.
Stanley A. Kuczaj is well known for his pioneering research with marine mammals and his early studies of human language development. He graduated from the University of Minnesota's Child Psychology program in 1976 and went on to be chair of Psychology at Southern Methodist University, and later at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he served as chair for over ten years. Stan was the recipient of numerous awards and was the President of the Comparative Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience Society/Division 6 of the American Psychological Association at the time of his passing in April, 2016. He was the director of the internationally renowned Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition laboratory where he had supervised dozens of MS and PhD theses and dissertations. At the time of his passing he had published over 125 peer-reviewed publications.
