Frans de Waal
Primatologist and science author
Frans de Waal was a Dutch-American primatologist who studied how apes behave and compared them with people. He wrote popular science books on the subject, including The Age of Empathy.
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Dutch Born 1948 in 's-Hertogenbosch, North Brabant, Netherlands Died 2024
About Frans de Waal
Frans de Waal (1948 to 2024) was a Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist, born in 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. He earned his doctorate in biology and ethology at the University of Utrecht and lived in the US from 1981. He held a chair in primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta and directed its Living Links Center. His research focused on the social lives of primates, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion and food-sharing. He retired from Emory in 2019. His first book, Chimpanzee Politics, appeared in 1982. He went on to write many more, including Our Inner Ape and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?. His books were translated into more than twenty languages and have reached the New York Times bestseller list. He belonged to the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2007.