Kosmas Hench

Kosmas Hench is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies. His work focuses on evolutionary processes linking social and genetic inheritance in wild populations, particularly gene-culture co-evolution and feedback dynamics between animal behavior and gene flow. He combines behavioral ecology and population genetics approaches.

Key research interests include adaptive radiation in marine environments, genomic architecture of phenotypic diversity, and conservation genomics. Notable publications address rapid radiation in Caribbean hamlet fishes and Antarctic fur seal genome refinement.

Fieldwork includes expeditions to Svalbard and collaborative projects on primate home range estimation. He develops bioinformatics tools and Docker containers for genomic analysis (e.g., genome assembly, population genetics).