Dr. Surbeck received his master diploma in Biology from the University of Zürich in 2003, after completing his diploma thesis on the determination of queens in social insects at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. 2011 in Biology from the University of Leipzig, after completing his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  Before moving to Harvard, he worked as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and established the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project in collaboration with Bonobo Conservation Initiative and Vie Sauvage.  Dr. Surbeck joined the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology in August 2019.  His lab studies the behavioural ecology of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, and he longs for days out in the rainforest walking with bonobos.