Daniel Horschler, Ph.D

I am a Principal Scientist on the Research & Innovation team at Hill's Pet Nutrition with expertise in cognitive and behavioral science. In this role, I lead research aimed at improving the health and well-being of pets, with a particular focus on brain and cognitive health. My work blends citizen science approaches with on-site research at the Hill's Global Pet Nutrition Center, and includes developing new cognitive, behavioral, and biological endpoints to quantify pet health. During my time at Hill's, I have also contributed to the development of collar-mounted tri-axial accelerometers for behavior tracking in dogs and cats.

Prior to joining Hill's, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, working with Dr. Laurie Santos and Dr. Julián Jara-Ettinger. My research in this role was funded by a Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, supporting my joint work with the Comparative Cognition Lab and Computational Social Cognition Lab to build and evaluate agent-based computational models of theory of mind.

I have 10+ years of experience conducting behavioral research in the social sciences, with formal training in both psychology and anthropology. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 with a B.S. in Psychology, and I received an M.A. (2018) and Ph.D. (2021) in Biological Anthropology from the University of Arizona under the direction of Dr. Evan MacLean. I have also previously taught courses in both the School of Anthropology and the School of Mind, Brain and Behavior at the University of Arizona. Additional areas of expertise include UX research, multi-disciplinary research, experimental design, quantitative and qualitative methods, and R for data analysis and visualization.

My research has focused on uncovering similarities and differences in cognitive skills between dogs, wolves, monkeys, apes, and humans, resulting in 20+ peer-reviewed publications and 30+ conference presentations. This work and related commentary has been covered by media outlets including Science Magazine, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, CBC, NBC, BBC, National Geographic, and The Washington Post. Along with my collaborators, my research with Canine Companions — the largest non-profit provider of service dogs — helped to identify cognitive skills that are associated with service dog success.

Other prior industry research experience includes time as a User Experience Researcher at Lenovo, where I completed a 2-year internship. In this role, I assisted with development of a large-scale text analytics tool for quantitative sentiment analyses and qualitatively analyzed user feedback to drive product design changes that were associated with improved usability.