Dr. Ashley Mensing

I completed my PhD in Anthropology at UCLA in 2026, where my dissertation research examined how early-life social and environmental experiences shape individual differences in behavior, stress physiology, and variation in behavioral strategies and reproductive outcomes in wild white-faced capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica.  Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as a research assistant at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University and at the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF.  In both roles, I helped develop novel PET radiotracers and neuroimaging techniques and assessed their relationship to cognition in healthy aging individuals and patients with neurodegenerative disorders. My research interests repeatedly move from human to primate to human models, with a very broad focus on behavioral biology and the adaptation of evolutionary models to long-lived, socially and cognitively complex species (like our own).

In the Bales Lab, I study the behavioral and neurobiological processes underlying social relationships in titi monkeys. This includes research on the role of the endocannabinoid system in pair bonding and its relevance to substance use disorder, using behavioral, pharmacological, and PET imaging approaches to investigate how social interactions alter CB1 receptor activity. I am also interested in individual variation in pair-bond formation across the lifespan, including whether responses to new partners reflect stable individual differences or change as a function of previous relationship experience. Across these projects, I am ultimately interested in how social experience becomes biologically embedded and why individuals differ in their responses to similar social and environmental conditions.