Dr Yuri Kawaguchi wins prestigious fellowship to join NTU Psychology research centre on two-year collaboration
Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is thrilled to announce that Dr Yuri Kawaguchi of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna will join NTU’s Psychology department on a two-year collaboration after securing a prestigious Newton International Fellowship.
Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Messerli Research Institute funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Yuri will join NTU’s School of Social Sciences in the Evolution and Social Interaction Research Group from May 2023. She will be working with Professor Bridget Waller and her European Research Council funded team, FACEDIFF.
Yuri’s research discipline is comparative cognition, and her research interest focuses on how visual cues of infants and perceptions of them have evolved to further understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying parenting behaviour.
At NTU Yuri will lead a project titled: ‘Evolutionary Function of Infantile Features in Faces: how does ‘babyness’ differ within and between species?’. The project will analyse the physical features of infant faces across different primate species.
Professor Waller welcomes Yuri to the University, saying: “We are thrilled to welcome Yuri to our team and are very much looking forward to starting this project. Scientists have been interested in how baby faces differ from adults for a long time, but this will be the first systematic investigation using validated geometric morphometrics methods.”
The Newton International Fellowship Scheme aims to attract the most promising early career postdoctoral researchers from overseas in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. Delivered by the British Academy and Royal Society, the fellowships enable researchers to work for two years at a UK institution with the aim of fostering long-term international collaborations.
Find out more about Newton International Fellowships on the British Academy website.