Co-superviser PhD student

Together with my CREAF colleague Professor Dani Sol I am happy to say I recently started co-supervising my first PhD Student. Marçal Pou Rossell will be studying the role of behavioural plasticity and individual differences related to (social) cognition in wild jackdaws. He will be working on the large monitored Jackdaw population dat Dani has been managing near Lleida, Spain, and his PhD work will likely combine GPS data with behavioural observations and automated nest-box monitoring to better understand how individuals deal with their changing environment, make foraging decisions, and how that is affected by their social context. You can find him on instagram here.

Co-organiser PhD workshop

Today we had the full-day PhD Workshop I co-organised with Jean-Christophe Billeter as part of the 2019 NVG (Netherlands Society for Behavioural Biology) Meeting in Groningen. The aim of the meeting was to facilitate discussion about science and academia for PhD students in the field of behavioural biology in a private setting. About 20 students participated and gave a talk about their work after which we had a general discussion about the things they were struggling with. It was really nice to be on the other side and help by sharing my own experiences and lessons I learned as a PhD student and early postdoc to manoeuvre through our world that is academia.

Organiser ASAB workshop on Raspberry Pi’s for researchers

At the ASAB Summer Conference in Konstanz this year, which was focused on new frontiers in the Study of Animal Behaviour, I gave a half-day workshop about automating behavioural experiments with Raspberry Pi’s.

After a general introduction, I discussed its use in animal behaviour research, how to set up, work with, and remotely control a raspberry pi, how to work with the rpi camera system, and finally how to automate recording, including via my own pirecorder software.

I started working with these amazing machines during my PhD, which where then still quite difficult to set up and quite slow, but now with the newest model for almost the same low price, so much is possible!

It was great to see so many people (120) interested in this great open-source technology for their own work, and many told me soon afterwards they immideately started setting-up their own systems.

Due to the interest and enthusiasm I am planning to give more and more hands-on workshops in the near future. Stay tuned!

 

Member of the Zukunftskolleg executive committee

I am very excited to say that, as a fellow of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz, I have recently started a one-year position as part of the Executive Committee, the central decision-making body of the Zukunftskolleg.

What makes the Zukuntskolleg quite unique as an Institute of Advanced Science is that the EC committee is not only made up of the directory, Vice Rector for Research and Academic Staff Development at the University, but also representatives of the fellows. In this way us fellows can ourselves play an important role in the management and decision-making of the Zukunftskolleg. A really great opportunity for me to help improve this great community.

A year as Research Officer and Clareity president at Clare College

My article on Clareity and the Clareity symposium in the autumn edition of Clare News

My article on Clareity and the Clareity symposium in the autumn edition of Clare News

With the start of the new academic year 2014-2015, my role as Graduate Research officer of the Graduate committee of Clare College (and Clareity President) has ended. It was a wonderful and diverse year. Next to organising a series of evening seminars where Clare graduates present their work and discuss topics in the humanities or natural sciences, and a full-day research symposium, I set-up a new umbrella organisation with the aim to increase the interdisciplinary discussion at Clare.
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