Pauline Delahaye won the 2nd prize of the Young Researcher Award

Pauline Delahaye, Research Fellow at the Department of Semiotics won the 2nd prize of the Young Researcher Award from Jane Goodall Institute France for her dedicated work in Zoosemiotics.

As stated on the Jane Goodall Institute’s France website, she has demonstrated, throughout her studies, rigor, method, and also inventiveness. She wrote an innovative, cutting-edge, and interdisciplinary thesis on the subject of animal emotions and the need for the evolution of our views/treatments with regard to other animal species. This thesis brought animals into the sciences of language as it was the first French thesis in Zoosemiotics.

Further, she led a project on the cohabitation between humans and rats in Paris. This project, carried out alone and without funding, also demonstrated her determination, which explains part of her success. This research led to a scientific publication and obtaining a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tartu.

Studying, diagnosing, and solving the problems of cohabitation between humans and liminal animals is a major issue both for the protection of animal life and biodiversity and human development.

Pauline Delahaye is an active and involved member of the French Society of Zoosemiotics, founded by Astrid Guillaume, through which she participates in the transmission of knowledge to the general public and in connecting researchers and specialists from various fields.

Young researcher award was launched by the scientific centre of the Jane Goodall Institute France in 2020 to honour researchers and their projects and/or research carried out on the human-animal relationship. The objective is to confirm the excellence of young researchers’ work at the dawn of their scientific career, offer them financial assistance to pursue their research, and allow better visibility of their work.