I study the mechanisms and consequences of collective behavior in biological and social systems. I am especially interested in understanding how animal groups make collective decisions and coordinate collective action, and in particular how these processes are affected by the social relationships between group members and the communication strategies they employ. I work across a range of study systems to tackle these questions, in close collaboration with researchers across a variety of disciplines.

Originally from Chicago, I did my undergraduate degree in Physics at Swarthmore College, then did my PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology at Princeton University. I then moved across the pond to Europe, where I held post doc positions at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Zurich before moving to Konstanz in 2018. When not working, I enjoy traveling (especially via Swiss transit), cooking, eating, riding my bicycle, and learning German.

I am a behavioural ecologist interested mainly in the topics of mammalian vocal communication in social settings. For the past 9 years, I have focused on the interplay between different aspects of the social environment with different aspects of signalling tactics and signal structure. I have investigated how the presence, composition and attentive state of conspecific audience affect individuals` signalling behaviour. On the flip side, I have explored how individuals` are able to maximize their gain from signalling and reach a more abundant and attentive audience by correctly timing their signalling events and also producing signals which are more effective in gaining and maintaining audience attention.

Currently, I am in the process of conceptually and methodologically developing a project dealing with the motivational phase of vocal signalling in an attempt to detect the animals' preparations and intentions to vocalize. Additionally, I am also interested in investigating animals’ ability to maintain continuous vocal interactions which include multiple interactions turns and dynamic informational content.  I have a very strong preference for field-based, experimental studies, as they allow us to witness animal behaviour in its natural ecological and biological contexts. 

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.

I am a physicist stumbling into the exciting field of animal ecology. In all generality, my research is about adapting machine- and deep-learning methods to scientific domains, such as bioacoustics.

Originally from Berlin, I have a somewhat scattered cv where I started as a trained audio technician, worked briefly in the film industry, and then studied physics, where I did a Bachelor's and Master's thesis in Geophysics. Then, I completed my doctorate in nonlinear quantum optics and collective many-body effects in nanoparticles. After a PostDoc at ETH Zurich, where I led the machine-learning team in the Nanostructures and Ultrafast X-ray Science group of Daniela Rupp, I am now working on representation learning of animal vocalizations.

The questions I am trying to answer are primarily concerned with finding a measure for similarity in animal vocalization (For example, for unsupervised classification of call types, subsequent identification of individuals, or sorting calls w.r.t. external levels of threat), where I use techniques from self-supervised learning.

When not sitting in front of a PC, I spend my remaining time with my family, where my daughter recently discovered that she is the boss of it all.

I’m a behavioural ecologist interested in how stable social systems evolve from collectives of individuals with variable experiences and diverse – and often competing – interests. In my research, I use a combination of field experiments, computational techniques, remote sensing, and long-term observational data to understand the interplay between societies and their constituents across scales – from the mechanics of individual behavioural interactions to the dynamics of social structure at the group level. My current work examines fission-fusion dynamics in hyena societies and explores movement decisions as a lens into the costs and benefits of social living. When I'm not doing science, I can be found on an adventure with my dog, cooking in the kitchen, or playing the banjo.

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 am interested in the behavioural ecology of social mammals, with a focus on field-based data collection. My undergraduate degree was in Zoology at the University of Bristol, where I continued as a masters by research student. For my masters, I studied alloparental care in a habituated population of wild dwarf mongooses in South Africa at the Dwarf Mongoose Research Project. I collected detailed observations of adult-pup interactions to assess the different types of alloparental activities which are exhibited and whether dominance status, sex and age influenced variation between these caring tasks.

For my PhD, I will be studying communication and collective movement of white-nosed coatis, which live in forested areas in the Americas. I will be recording acoustic and movement data from the majority of coati group members using custom built collars to analyse how group cohesion is coordinated and maintained through acoustic communication. I am excited to be combining detailed field-based observations with new tracking technologies to answer questions about the mechanisms underlying collective movement in social mammals.

I am fascinated by behaviours exhibited by animal collectives, such as movement and synchronisation. I am also intrigued by computational and theoretical methods in biology, and love handling interesting datasets. My Master's and Bachelor's, both in biology, were completed in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. There, I worked on grouping in blackbuck, collective track formation by herbivores, and several other problems. In collaboration with Ari, during my master's I studied behavioural dynamics using accelerometry of spotted hyenas.

My PhD addresses a variety of questions, from the synchronisation of circadian rhythms in spotted hyenas to the dynamics of behaviour at the fine scale across species and the validity of information theoretic methods in the study of behaviour.

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 a visiting PhD student from the Holekamp Lab at Michigan State University. I completed my undergraduate degree in wildlife ecology at Duke University. I am interested in behavioral ecology, especially foraging and hunting in social carnivores. I am a field biologist at heart and have spent close to 3 years observing spotted hyenas in the wild through the Mara Hyena Project in Kenya.

For my PhD, I will use GPS, audio, and accelerometer data collected through tracking collars to study the foraging behavior of these spotted hyenas. I am especially interested in the social dynamics that influence participation in group hunts.

I am originally from Germany, but moved to the United States when I was younger. I am excited to be back here and practice my German. When not at work, I enjoy riding my bike, lifting weights, reading books, and traveling.

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.

I am interested in studying the behaviour of animals as we can learn a lot from them. For example, we can tell when group-living animals are about to collectively move due to the use of their signals which can either be visual, auditory, olfactory, and acoustic. My undergraduate degree and honours degree were both in Zoology and both of them were completed at the University of the Free State, South Africa, where I am currently pursuing my MSc degree in Zoology. For my honours project, I investigated paw preference/use in bat-eared foxes (Otocyon megalotis) using video data (foxes interacting with food puzzles) that was collected in another study that was testing novelty in this species at the Kalahari Research Center (KRC) where I also collected my MSc data.

My MSc work focuses on collective movement in meerkats (Suricata suricatta). I attached custom-built collars that had GPS tags and microphones on meerkats for data collection. Therefore, I look at the effect of relative meerkats’ spatial position on foraging success using their daily morning weight gain as a measure of foraging success. Again, I also investigate the motivation of move call production in this species using chewing sound frequency as a measure of foraging success. I want to see if individuals with low chewing sound frequency, indicating poor foraging, will produce more move calls signaling that they want to move to another foraging patch.

Hi! I am Annika and I am a master’s student in Biological sciences at the University of Constance.

For my master’s thesis, I am studying recruitment events in meerkats and investigating how participation in risky actions is determined on an individual level and how these actions emerge on a group level. There, I am especially interested in how information is propagated and responded to. To address this, I will combine video, GPS and audio data.
In general, I am interested in how animal behavior is affected by environmental changes, focusing on group cohesion and animal communication.

When I am not working, I enjoy reading books, relaxing on the couch and crocheting or going to the gym.