When senses take flight: the evolution, development, mechanisms and function of avian senses

Hannah Rowland is a lecturer in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Cambridge, and Research fellow at the Institute of Zoology. She is a fellow of Churchill College. Hannah's research focuses on the evolutionary ecology of insect prey defences and avian predators' sensory behaviour and learning. Hannah's research explores how birds recognise, perceive and respond to bitter tastes. Hannah received her PhD, entitled "The visual and behavioural ecology of countershading and other defences", at the University of Liverpool in 2007. Her thesis received two prizes: the Thomas Henry Huxley Award from the Zoological Society of London (for best zoology thesis in the UK), and the Alfred Russel Wallace Award from the Royal Entomological Society (for best entomology thesis).
Before arriving at Cambridge, Hannah was a NERC-funded postdoctoral research associate at the University of Glasgow, where she investigated the evolution of masquerade: that's when animals mimic the appearance of inanimate objects such as twigs and leaves. And before that, she did a postdoc at the University of Liverpool, researching the evolution of mimicry. She studies wild free-living birds in the field, and captive wild-caught birds in aviary experiments.

Innes Cuthill has been Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Bristol since 1998. After a first degree in Zoology at Cambridge and a D.Phil. at Oxford, he held a demonstratorship in ornithology and a Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose College Oxford, then moved to a lectureship in Bristol in 1989. Most of his work is strongly interdisciplinary, in the last decade collaborating closely with perceptual psychologists and computational neuroscientists to develop and test models of animal colour vision and animal coloration. In 1998 he won the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London, and in 2005 the Nature (Nature Publishing Group) and NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) award for mentoring in science; he was President of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour from 2007 to 2010 and is currently one of the senior editors of Proceedings B.

Tom Pike obtained his PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 2004, working on the mechanisms underpinning sex ratio manipulation in birds. Since then he has held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Glasgow, St Andrews and Exeter, before moving to the University of Lincoln as an independent NERC research fellow in 2011 to work on avian olfactory communication. He is now a senior lecturer in behavioural ecology. He has broad research interests within behavioural and sensory ecology, although the primary focus remains on the evolution of visual and olfactory signals - from the perspective of both signallers and receivers - using a variety of fish, bird and insect models.