Alex Mielke

Dr. Alex Mielke is a Lecturer in Psychology and Open Science Lead at Queen Mary University of London's School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. He holds a PhD in Biology (2018) from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, an MSc in Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology (2012) from the University of St Andrews, and a BSc in Psychology (2010) from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on primate sociality, cooperation, and communication, with emphasis on wild primates like chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys. He is particularly interested in reproducibility in observational studies, animal play sequences, and non-verbal communication.

• Education:
  • PhD in Biology, 2018: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
  • MSc in Evolutionary and Comparative Psychology, 2012: University of St Andrews
  • BSc in Psychology, 2010: Freie Universität Berlin

His research interests include quantifying social structures in primates, improving reproducibility in ethological methods, and analyzing play behavior as a window into cognitive complexity. He has developed tools like NetFACS for facial communication analysis and contributed to studies on chimpanzee gesture syntax. He leads projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust and ESRC, including work on primate play's grammatical structure and syntactical analysis of ape gestures.

Dr. Mielke has supervised PhD student Kassandra Giragosian and postdoctoral researcher Alexandra Safryghin. His awards include a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2021–2023) and a Newton International Fellowship (2020–2021). He is affiliated with Queen Mary University’s Centre for Brain and Behaviour and the Wild Minds Lab at the University of St Andrews.