Doctoral Students

I am an ecologist specialized in tropical ecosystems. I investigated a diverse array of wildlife in South America, Africa and Asia, putting conservation at the forefront of my work. In my PhD, I focus on the effect of human (Homo sapiens) hunting on mammal abundance and movement patterns. In the wider study site of the LuiKotale Bonobo Project, DRC, I assess the mammal community across areas that have been protected for different lengths of time.

• Conservation • Monitoring • Mammal Community • Hunting

I am a behavioral ecologist with training in comparative psychology and ethology. Broadly, I am interested in social cognition, communication, and decision-making in animal societies. For my PhD, I will be studying how spotted hyenas communicate to obtain relevant information that 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.

I am interested in mechanisms driving sexual selection, the strategies of individuals to overcome constrains deriving from intra-sexual mate competition and mate choice. In my PhD I will investigate the strategies of male bonobos to enhanced mating and reproductive success and the response of females towards different male mating strategies. I am also interested in the nature of social relationships between males and females, and how demography and kinship affect life history profiles and fitness of individual males.
• Mating strategies • Reproductive success • Social relationships

In my PHD project, I compare native and ornamental flowers in their ability to be an optimal food source for insect pollinators. Since ornamental plants are mainly adapted to human visual preferences and don’t share a long coevolution process with native pollinators, it is hard to say whether insect pollinators can actually use them as reliable food sources.

To investigate this problem, I work with bumblebees and hawkmoths, since both are very visually guided pollinators, with similar visual systems, yet very different foraging strategies and food needs.

I look at their visual preferences, their foraging efficiency and the nectar contents of the flowers and compare these aspects between native and ornamental plants.

I am a behavioral ecologist, studying the cultural transmission of behaviors and how this relates to socio-ecological, environmental, and individual differences. By combining observations with non-invasive experiments and statistical modeling, I aim to learn more about animal culture. I study social learning of stone tool use in island living white-faced capuchin monkeys, with the aim to discover which factors drive the development of this behavior, as island populations seem to be more prone to develop tool use. 

• Tool use • Cultural transmission • Thanatology • Capuchins

I am curious about how insects perceive their environment and want to understand the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of sensory information. In my PhD I study how the visual system of nocturnal hawkmoths processes highly dynamic visual inputs based on natural sceneries, and how behavioural strategies might optimise sensory acquisition.

Insect  • nocturna  • vision  • neural processing  • natural environment

I’m interested in sensory ecology and how it mediates animal behavior. Using behavioral data from flower foraging insects, I study how visual mechanisms and experiences shape visual preferences during plant-pollinator interactions.

I am a field biologist interested in behavior, ecology and natural history of forest mammals. I study the dynamics of biodiversity and the effects of disconnected habitats caused by anthropogenic change. By assessing the occupancy of community of forest mammals in the Panama Canal area, I aim to identify the degree of landscape connectivity across plantation mosaics that are disconnecting forests.

• Landscape Connectivity • Conservation • Coffee • Capuchins

My main interest is social behaviour of bonobos (Pan paniscus): its evolution, structure and functions. I am fascinated by the dynamics of bonobo networks: how their properties change with ecological factors and how individuals’ positions vary in the potential influence on network structure. Using my mathematical background, I apply social network analysis to study global and local patterns of associations and interactions between individuals within a community. For my MSc thesis, I focused on how network characteristics influence disease spread in the bonobos of LuiKotale. 

• Bonobo • Network analysis • Social behaviour

How does the brain integrate different, often conflicting, sources of information to form a decision? Using the small and transparent larval zebrafish, I study the neural circuits involved in decision-making. To understand these circuits, I combine behavioural experiments, model simulations and 2-photon imaging.

Decision-making  • neural circuits • microscopy • zebrafish

I am a behavioral ecologist broadly interested in how group-living animals make decisions. Currently, I study foraging decisions by wild bonobos (Pan paniscus) to better understand how individuals optimize their nutrient intake and energetic costs as food availability varies, and how these individual foraging decisions influence group fission-fusion dynamics. I am also investigating how social and environmental factors influence groups’ decisions about when and how to interact with one another. 

• Decision-making • Foraging Behavior • Bonobos