Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany.
Iain's research has provided new insights into evolved collective behavior, including the mechanisms that underlie leadership, information transmission, collective memory, emergent sensing, and effective consensus decision-making in animal groups. His work has had impact beyond biology, including in physics, engineering and complexity science.
Iain studied biology at the University of St Andrews and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bath. Following postdoctoral work at Leeds and Princeton, he was a Junior Fellow at Balliol College and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He later became a Professor at Princeton University before moving to Konstanz where he founded the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Excellence Cluster 'Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour'. His honors include the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London (2013), the Lagrange Prize (2019), the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2022), the Fyssen International Prize (2024), and the President’s Medal of the Royal Entomological Society (2025).
Professional position
- Director, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, Max Planck Society
- Professor, University of Konstanz
