Collective animal behaviour through time - POSTPONED

Professor Dora Biro, University of Oxford, UK and University of Rochester, USA

Dora Biro received her PhD in Zoology from the University of Oxford. She subsequently held a JSPS postdoctoral research fellowship and a visiting professorship at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, Japan, before returning to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 2007. She was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Zoology and Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford in 2013, and Professor of Animal Behaviour in 2019. She is currently Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, USA. Her research interests are centred on animal cognition, particularly in the contexts of navigation, tool use, culture and collective decision-making

Professor Iain Couzin, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany

Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the German Research Foundation Cluster of Excellence 'Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour' at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was a full Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behaviour, and consequently includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from neural collectives to insect swarms, fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, Popular Science’s 'Brilliant 10' Award in 2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013, a Web of Science Global Highly Cited Researcher since 2018, the Lagrange Prize in 2019, and the Leibniz Prize, Germany’s highest research honour, in 2022.

Dr Elva Robinson, University of York, UK

Elva Robinson studies the organisation of social insect societies, combining empirical and modelling work to identify the simple rules followed by individual members of a colony, and to determine how they interact to produce adaptive group-level behaviours. Elva began working in this area with an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Sheffield. Her post-doctoral work at the University of Bristol involved pioneering a new technique for studying ants: using tiny radio-tags to monitor and manipulate individual ants’ access to information. She moved to the University of York on a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis and is now a Senior Lecturer in Ecology in the Department of Biology. Her current research spans from models and controlled laboratory experiments advancing the theoretical understanding of the organisation of social behaviour, through to ecological fieldwork investigating the adaptive significance and applied consequences of sociality in insects.

Professor James Marshall, Opteran Technologies and The University of Sheffield, UK

James Marshall is Professor of Theoretical and Computational Biology at the University of Sheffield, and Chief Science Officer at Opteran Technologies. His interests span collective behaviour, evolutionary theory, and decision theory. Recently he has moved towards using robots as a testbed for the models he works on, and in 2020 co-founded Opteran as a spinout from the University of Sheffield, to develop a new approach for robot autonomy based on reverse-engineering insect brains.

Dr Vishwesha Guttal, Indian Institute of Science, India

Vishwesha (Vishu) Guttal is fascinated by the patterns and functions of self-organisation in the biological world. He did his PhD in Physics with Jayaprakash (at The Ohio State University, USA), working on applying tools of physics to ecosystem self-organisation. He did his postdoc with Iain Couzin at Princeton University, working on the evolution of collective motion in animal groups. Vishu is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science where he and his lab members use theory, computation, experiments and field work to understand patterns and functions of collective motion and more broadly self-organising ecosystems. 

Professor Jens Krause, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany

Jens Krause is a behavioural ecologist with a strong interest in collective behaviour and social networks. He has published a number of books (Living in Groups, OUP; Fish Cognition and Behavior, Wiley/Blackwells; Exploring Animal Social Networks, PUP; Animal Social Networks, OUP) and articles on the mechanisms and functions of living in groups. He is currently Professor for Fish Biology and Ecology in the Faculty of Life Science at the Humboldt University Berlin, Head of Department at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and on the executive board of the excellence cluster 'Science of intelligence'. He started his university education at the Free University Berlin and obtained his PhD from St John’s College Cambridge, UK, followed by postdocs at Mount Allison University, Canada, and Princeton University, USA, and held a Professorship for behavioural ecology at Leeds University, UK, for several years before moving back to Berlin in 2009. 

Dr Stephen Montgomery, University of Bristol, UK

Dr Montgomery's primary interests are focused around how brains and behaviour evolve. He did his PhD on primate brain evolution with Dr Nick Mundy, at the University of Cambridge, and then held a series of fellowships at Oxford and UCL, with Professor Judith Mank, before returning to Cambridge to establish his own group. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow, funded by a NERC Fellowship and an ERC Starter Grant, and Proleptic Senior Lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. His group is interested in how brains adapt to different environments, how changes in brain structure produce behavioural differences, and how selection navigates developmental and functional constraints that may limit or channel the adaptive response. They take a comparative approach to tackling these questions, comparing molecular and phenotypic data across species. 

Dr Seirian Summer, University College London, UK