BEHAVIOUR 2013

Programme

Plenary talks:

• 

  Iain Couzin, Princeton University, USA

  Iain’s work addresses adaptive collective phenomena in animal groups such as bird flocks, fish schools and insect swarms. He uses a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches. His talk will explore the principles of collective intelligence, and by explicitly reconstructing sensory networks in mobile animal groups, how distributed sensing and decision-making emerge from the dynamics of social interactions.

• 

  Jane Hurst, University of Liverpool, UK

  Jane’s interests are in the functions, mechanisms and evolution of scent communication in mammals, the interactions between behaviour and disease, and animal welfare. Her work on scent communication has allowed her to address the interaction between behavioural and biochemical aspects of communication.

• 

  Barbara Webb, Edinburgh University, UK

  Barbara’s innovative approach to understanding the control of behaviour involves building computational and robotic model organisms to understand how animals work. Recent topics addressed include multimodal integration, navigation and learning. Her talk will be about robot models of animal behavior.

• 

  Kazuo Okanoya, University of Tokyo and JST-ERATO, Japan

  Kazuo studies vocal communication from a comparative perspective. His research is notable in that it spans from neuroscience to behaviour, and that it seeks to integrate our understanding of birdsong with our understanding of human language. His talk will explore social factors in bird song learning.

• 

  Sharoni Shafir, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

  Sharoni's interests are in cognition and behavioural ecology of honeybees. He has extended the study of risk-sensitivity and context-dependent evaluations in decision making from the vertebrate systems where they are usually studied to the bee, producing a series of remarkable experimental studies.

Additional Speaker:

• 

  Winner of the ASAB Young Investigator Award 2011 Sarah Pryke, Australian National University, Australia

  Sarah has broad interests in behavioural and evolutionary ecology. Most of her work is focused on Gouldian finches, a unique colour polymorphic species that has a number of unusual characteristics that provide opportunities for investigating prominent questions in behavioural and evolutionary ecology.

Other Events:

• David Noakes and Marian Dawkins: "A celebration with Aubrey Manning".
  Click here for more information
• Academic publishers’ workshops