Dr. Francesca De Petrillo comes from a small rural village in the South of Italy and became passionate about animal behaviour and cognition when she was six years old. She received her Ph.D. in Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, with a focus on Anthropology, from the University Sapienza of Rome, Italy, where she compared economic decision-making strategies across adults, young children, and non-human primate species to shed light on the evolutionary origins and developmental trajectories of human decision-making. She then completed two postdoctoral fellowships, first at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France. During this period, she compared decision-making and cognitive control across multiple primate species, including rhesus macaques, Barbary macaques, and lemurs, to test how socioecology shapes cognition. Currently, she is a lecturer in Psychology at the School of Psychology at Newcastle University in the UK. Her research seeks to elucidate how different species acquire and process information from the physical and the social world and whether variation in cognitive abilities, including decision strategies, relates to differences in life history, ecology, and social structure. She addresses these questions by studying the cognitive abilities supporting decision-making and executive control of different primate populations, including captive brown capuchin monkeys, free-ranging populations of macaques, and different species of lemurs. Other aspects of her research examine the origins of monetary systems, specifically whether the ability to categorize money can be traced back to non-human primates. To do so, she analyses the exchange behaviour of brown tufted capuchin monkeys.