Kristin Andrews, Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center is York Research Chair in Animal Minds and Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto (on leave), was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College, and is currently a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fellow on the Future Flourishing project. Andrews is the author of several books on animal minds, covering topics from social cognition, personhood, society, and consciousness. These include How To Study Animal Minds (Cambridge), Chimpanzee Persons: The Philosopher’s Brief  (Routledge) and Mindreading Animals: Toward a New Folk Psychology (MIT). She is on the Board of Directors of the Borneo Orangutan Society Canada, and has been active in animal policy and conservation contexts, including co-launching the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.

Professor Andrews brings empirical and theoretical expertise to questions about the similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals in terms of their cognitive, affective, social, and cultural capacities. She has developed novel frameworks and methodologies for social and normative cognition that can be used to investigate these capacities in other animals. Professor Andrews is currently engaged in several projects related to social norms. She is writing a trade book on culture and social norms in animal societies, and the implications for living well with other species. She is also collaborating on projects investigating social norms in chimpanzees, dogs, fish, and bees, and exploring the implications of these findings for animal conservation and welfare efforts. Professor Andrews is actively engaged in research on animal consciousness, and the relationship between sociality and the function of consciousness. She has written several articles on animal consciousness and continues to investigate the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, the functions of consciousness, and its long evolutionary history.

Funding statement: K.A. is supported by the CIFAR Future Flourishing program, York University’s York Research Chair program and SSHRC Insight Grant #435-2022-0749.