EHBEA 2027
Conference of the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association
Zürich, Switzerland
29 March - 2 April 2027
EHBEA 2027
29 March - 2 April 2027
The upcoming conference of the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA) will take place in Zurich, Switzerland from 29th of March until 2nd of April 2027.
EHBEA is committed to organising genuinely interdisciplinary conferences that bring together all researchers applying evolutionary theory to the behavioural sciences, including behavioural ecology, psychology (e.g., comparative, social, developmental), ethology (e.g., sociobiology, primatology), anthropology, cultural evolution, archaeology, sociology, linguistics, narratology, medicine, and more.
We welcome empirical and theoretical submissions adhering to high standards of scientific rigour and ethics. Our Code of Conduct can be found on the EHBEA website.
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Please see our call for abstracts for more details!​​
Timeline
Nov 1, 2026
Abstract Submission Open
Jan 1, 2027
Abstract Submission Deadline
Jan 8, 2027
Registration Open
Feb 1, 2027
Notification of Acceptance
Feb 12, 2027
Early Bird Registration Deadline
Mar 15, 2027
Late Registration Deadline
Mar 29 - Apr 2, 2027
EHBEA conference
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Gillian Brown
Gillian Brown is Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. She received her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. Following a postdoctoral position in Cambridge, she moved to the University of St Andrews, progressing from Lecturer to Reader and then Professor. Her work has been supported, among others, by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. Her research examines sex and gender differences and similarities in behaviour and cognition, from an evolutionary perspective on human behaviour. Previously, Prof. Brown investigated the role of gonadal hormones in the development of sex differences in behaviour in non-human animals. Her current research focuses on humans, specifically on topics such as gender role attitudes, partner preferences, and gender-based microaggressions. Core questions that Prof. Brown and her research group address include: Do men and women differ in their behaviour and cognition? If so, what roles do biological factors (such as genes and hormones) and socio-cultural factors play? Can evolutionary theory be usefully applied to the study of human behaviour? If so, how has culture influenced human evolution?
Prof. Ernst Fehr
Ernst Fehr has been Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economics at the University of Zürich since 1994. He served as director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics and chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He currently serves as director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society. He has been a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University since 2011 and was an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2003 to 2011. His work focuses on proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human altruism and the interplay between social preferences, social norms and strategic interactions. He has conducted extensive research on the impact of social preferences on competition, cooperation and on the psychological foundations of incentives. Fehr’s work is characterized by the combination of game theoretic tools with experimental methods and the use of insights from economics, social psychology, sociology, biology and neuroscience for a better understanding of human social behavior.
Prof. Mhairi Gibson
Mhairi Gibson is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. She completed her Master’s degree at the University of Cambridge and holds a Ph.D. from University College London, where she also conducted her postdoctoral research from 2002 to 2005 before moving to the University of Bristol. Her research seeks to understand variation in women’s reproductive life histories and health, incorporating theories and methods from human behavioural ecology, social statistics, and anthropology. Based on long-term fieldwork in south-central Ethiopia, Prof. Gibson studies the drivers of recent changes in reproduction, health, and parenting among Arsi Oromo farmers. She also works on the social dynamics of normative practices that are harmful to women and girls, particularly identifying the individual and community factors that explain the persistence of female genital cutting/mutilation and intimate partner violence.
Prof. Björn Lindström
Björn Lindström is a Principal Researcher at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He obtained his PhD from the Karolinska Institute in 2014 and subsequently received a Marie Curie fellowship to continue his research at the Center for Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich. He later joined the University of Amsterdam as a postdoctoral researcher and held a tenured Assistant Professor position in the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at VU Amsterdam from 2020 to 2022. His work has been supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship. He currently leads the Mechanisms of Social Behavior team at the Karolinska Institutet, within the Division of Psychology at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience. His research focuses on understanding the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying social learning; the process through which we acquire knowledge from and about others. Through this lens, his work contributes to our understanding of human culture and cultural evolution, the transmission of ideas and behaviors across generations. His research approach combines behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging techniques.
Prof. Barbara Taborsky
Barbara Taborsky is an Associate Professor at the University of Bern, a position she has held since 2013, and has served as a Docent there since 2007. Between 2006 and 2009, she was a Research Scholar at IIASA in Laxenburg, Austria. Prior to that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern from 2002 to 2006 and as a Post-Doc at KLIVV in Vienna from 1995 to 2002. She completed her MSc and PhD studies at the University of Vienna. Her research examines how early-life environments shape lifelong phenotypes through developmental plasticity, with a focus on social behaviour, life-history traits, and their evolutionary significance. Using, for example, the cooperatively breeding cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher, a highly social fish species, as a model system, her group investigates how complex, multidimensional environments influence development across ontogenetic stages, integrating functional, ecological, neurobiological, and endocrine perspectives. She combines laboratory experiments in semi-natural settings as well as ecological surveys, long-term records of individual life-histories, and large-scale experiments in the wild. The research in her group currently focusses on (1) effects of the early environment through developmental plasticity on adaptations of the social phenotype and emergent properties at the society level such as social organisations and division of labour; (2) parental effects on later-life traits and their non-genetic inheritance to subsequent generations; (3) neuromolecular and endocrine regulation of behavioural traits; (4) effects of early social experience on cognition and behavioural flexibility; and (5) the evolution of behaviour and life history decisions by theoretical modelling.
