I am a research group leader jointly affiliated with the MPI-AB Ecology of Animal Societies Department and the University of Konstanz Biology Department.

My group studies the mechanisms and consequences of collective behavior in social animals. We seek to understand how individuals in groups coordinate with one another to make collective decisions and engage in collective action. Our research focuses on investigating how these processes shape and are shaped by the social relationships among group members, and the communication strategies they employ. 

To tackle these questions, we combine high-resolution tracking of entire social groups in the wild with boots-on-the-ground field biology, and develop analytical approaches to infer from these data how individuals make decisions and how these decisions give rise to the patterns of collective behavior we see in nature. 

Our approach to science is highly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and comparative. We study a range of different species, and work in close collaboration with many other researchers and several long-term field studies around the world.

My current research aims to understand how differences in early experiences can affect an individual’s ability to coordinate effectively with group members later in life and whether and if so, how these differences ultimately affect individual fitness. I address these questions using two study systems, the domestic chicken and the common pheasant, and make use of the fact that both species are highly vocal and use acoustic signals to coordinate group activities. This work is in close collaboration with Prof Madden (University of Exeter) and Prof Radford (University of Bristol).

I completed my PhD on meerkat group coordination and decision-making at the University of Zurich, after which I studied the effect of anthropogenic disturbances on the social cohesion of California ground squirrels in collaboration with Dr Smith at Mills College. I also did a postdoc with Dr Meroz at Tel Aviv University to study the self-organisation of mutually shading sunflower plants. When not at work I love everything related to the arts and crafts and always appreciate a donation of wine-corks.

As a behavioral ecologist focused on group-living animals, I study how variation between individuals impacts their social interactions, how social interactions shape group-level properties, and how group-level properties affect individual experiences and fitness. While I am interested in many facets of social behavior, most of my work aims to understand how collective decisions, competitive regimes, and movement patterns arise from social processes and relate to fitness in wild animals. To do so, I combine information afforded by long-term monitoring of recognized individuals with fine-scale behavioral tracking technologies. Currently, I am collaborating with several field-based research projects to investigate these dynamics in meerkats, white-nosed coatis, and spotted hyenas.

Before joining CoCoMo, I received my B.S. from George Washington University, where I studied the socio-spatial behavior of juvenile chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, and my Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, where I studied the relationship between individual variation and collective behavior of baboons in Amboseli, Kenya. When I’m not watching or thinking about animals, I like to watch or think about movies and to go to the beach with my friends.

I’m a behavioural ecologist broadly interested in communication and collective movement in social groups. My research focuses on understanding the proximate and ultimate drivers of fission-fusion dynamics, as these processes offer insight into the costs and benefits of group living.

During my PhD, I simultaneously recorded the locations and vocalisations of all members of three wild white-nosed coati social groups in Panama. These data revealed that coatis frequently split into subgroups, often along kin lines, and that vocal communication likely plays a key role in coordinating their collective movements.

In my postdoc, I am investigating how the quantity, quality, and distribution of food resources influence these collective decisions. Building on methods developed during my PhD, I am also studying the patterns and drivers of fission-fusion dynamics across species. By examining these dynamics broadly, I aim to uncover how they shape population structures and wider ecological patterns.

Outside of research, I enjoy hiking, painting, and stroking cats.

I am interested in social cognition, communication and decision-making in animal societies. I did my B.Sc. in Psychology at University of Marburg, and my M.Sc. in Ethology at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. I completed my two master’s theses on vervet monkey friendships at University of Lausanne, and on chimpanzee social cognition at the Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, respectively. After my master’s, I spent a year doing field work at the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I worked as a data collection coordinator and did extensive behavioral observations of wild bonobos.

For my PhD, I will be studying how spotted hyenas communicate to obtain relevant information which further shapes their decision-making on group coordination. I am excited to combine acoustic, GPS and accelerometer data to address questions on the social decision-making process in spotted hyenas from the Mara Hyena Project in Kenya.

I am originally from Taiwan, a subtropical island with high biodiversity in the Pacific. When I am not working, I enjoy painting with watercolor, camping, traveling with a canoe or my bike, running in the forest or snorkeling in the tropical ocean.

I am interested in Bioacoustics, which nicely combines my passion for music, audio production and evolutionary biology. Within this field, I have been lucky to learn about aspects of sound production and communication in very different groups of animals and scientific contexts.

During my Bachelor’s degree at Universität Münster, I explored sound production and vocal learning in songbirds and hummingbirds. During my Master’s degree at Leiden University I investigated the involvement of visual cues in zebra finch call exchanges using a robotic bird. I also worked on a project focused on compiling high-quality datasets of grasshopper and cicada sounds for training species classifiers, as well as testing new machine-learning methods for encoding high-frequency audio signals.

In my PhD project, which is part of the EU-funded BioAcoustic AI Consortium, I will study the dynamics and functions of vocal interactions in social mammals. I will analyse movement and audio data collected from wild animal groups. I will also explore and implement machine-learning methods that are specifically suited to detect and analyse animal vocalisations from a broad range of species.