Alice Hill

Research interests
Broadly, I am interested in the fitness consequences of social behavior in all animals. For my PhD, I will be focusing on wild Assamese macaques and exploring how and why adult males care for infants. Which behaviors are most important and how is this care distributed? Crucially, I will be investigating the fitness benefits that these behaviors may confer to both the infants and to the males themselves. In order to answer these questions, I will be combining long-term behavioral and demographic data with genetic data on relatedness.

Academic career

• 2023 – present: PhD, Behavior and Cognition (collaboration between Faculty of Biology and Psychology of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the German Primate Center)
  Thesis topic: Drivers and consequences of male care in wild macaques
• 2021 – 2023: MS, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (University of Michigan, USA)
  Thesis topic: Comparing measures of sociality in white-faced capuchins–redundancy and sensitivity to sampling
• 2017 – 2021: BS, double major in Neuroscience & Ecology and Evolutionary Biodiversity (University of Michigan, USA)
  Thesis topic: Corticosterone enhances formation of neutral but not fear memory during infectious illness
  

Publications and Presentation

• Hill, A., Johnston, C., Arganoff, I., Akil, H. & Spencer-Segal, J.L. (2023). Corticosteroid treatment during sepsis alters hippocampal function in male and female survivors. Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsgos.2023.08.001
• Hill, A. & Bergman, T. No evidence of a tradeoff between direct and indirect social ties in white-faced capuchins. Poster presentation at Behaviour 2023, August 2023, Universität Bielefeld (Germany).
• Hill, A., Khalil, H., Laborc, K., Kounelis-Wuillaume, S., Johnston, C., Gavade, S., Singer, B.H., Akil, H. & Spencer-Segal, J.L. (2023). Corticosterone enhances formation of non-fear but not fear memory during infectious illness. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 1144173. doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1144173
• Hill, A. & Bergman, T. Social networks shift following the arrival of new males in a group of white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus). Poster presentation at 18th Annual Midwest Primate Interest Group Conference, October 2022, Ann Arbor, MI (USA).
• Hill, A. & Spencer-Segal, J. L. (2021). Glucocorticoids and the Brain after Critical Illness. Endocrinology, 162(3), bqaa242. doi.org/10.1210/endocr/bqaa242
• Hill, A., Johnston, C., Spencer-Segal, J. L. Corticosterone enhances formation of neutral but not fear memory during infectious illness. Poster presentation at ENDO 2021, March 2021 (virtual).