My current research focuses on investigating whether or not the utilization of social information is taxonomically widespread, beneficial in different ecological conditions, and independent of permanent group-living similarly to the exploitation of other biotic or abiotic cues in the environment. I use several model systems to test related predictions in the contexts of foraging and predator avoidance, and build individual-based models to investigate how social information-mediated behavioural adjustments may affect population dynamics and species interactions.
Assistant Professor, University of Guelph.
I am a comparative animal physiologist who integrates across disciplines and levels of biological organization to understand how animals cope with changing environmental conditions, and why some individuals and species are better able to tolerate these changes than others. Particular interests are understanding how animals sense environmental change, and how the phenotype is adjusted in response (i.e. plasticity). My research is focussed on fish functional morphology and respiratory physiology, but also includes evolutionary physiology, behavioural ecology, and conservation biology.
Giorgio Vallortigara is Professor of Neuroscience at the Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento, Italy, and he has been an Adjunct Professor at the School of Biological, Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at the University of New England, Australia for several years.
He is the author of over 400 scientific papers (with more than 30,000 citations overall; h-index: 76 Scopus; 96 Google Scholar), most in the area of animal cognition and comparative neuroscience. He discovered the first evidence of functional brain asymmetry in the so-called “lower” vertebrate species (fish, amphibians); he also worked on comparative cognition, in particular on visual perception of biological motion, and spatial and number cognition.
He served in the editorial boards of several cognitive science and neuroscience journals, he was co-editor of the journal “Laterality: Asymmetries of Brain, Body and Cognition” and has been the recipient of several awards.
His major research interest is the study of cognition in a comparative and evolutionary perspective, with particular reference to the mechanisms underlying the use of geometry in spatial navigation and the origins of number and object cognition in the animal brain. He also studied extensively the evolution of the asymmetry of the brain.
Oceanographer and bioacoustician facilitating the recovery of endangered regional icons of the Pacific Northwest (U.S.), particularly southern resident killer whales and Pacific salmon. I helped design and was the first major in the Earth Systems program at Stanford University, then earned a M.S. and PhD in Oceanography at the University of Washington. In 2003 I founded Beam Reach and taught ~50 undergraduates and recent graduates to ask and answer their own marine field science questions during 10-week field courses from 2005-2012. During the same period I helped create the Salish Sea Hydrophone Network -- orcasound.net -- which I continue to administer.
Jennifer Vonk is a comparative/cognitive psychologist with primary research interests in two overlapping areas: (1) animal cognition and behavior, and (2) animal welfare. The underlying goal of her work is to examine cognitive continuities and discontinuities between humans and both closely and distantly related species. Her current work centers on social cognition, such as theory of mind, prosociality, and reasoning about emotions, as well as physical cognition, such as causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, numerosity, and natural concept formation. More recent work is focused on examining the effects of early life experiences on human and animal decision-making processes.
Researcher at the Institute of Tropical Aquaculture and Fisheries, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. Dr. Khor Waiho obtained his Ph.D. in Aquaculture from Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (2016) and completed a 2-year postdoctoral (Biology, 2017-2019) at Shantou University, China. His current research focus includes the impact of climate change on crustacean growth and reproductive biology, population biology and fishery, and the aquaculture of economically important crustacean species.
Professor of Biology at the University of Manitoba and Research Fellow of the Mammal Research Institute, Department of Zoology and Entomology at the University of Pretoria. Academic editor of PLOS ONE and former Associate Editor of the Journal of Mammalogy.
Associate Professor of Comparative Vertebrate Physiology at the University of Toronto Scarborough; Associate Chair of Research and Graduate Affairs, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough; Chair-Elect of the Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry of The Society for Integrative Biology.
Albert H.C. Wong is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and a Professor at the University of Toronto. He attended medical school at the University of Toronto, where he also completed specialty training in psychiatry and a PhD in neurobiology. Dr. Wong’s lab uses animal models and clinical studies to investigate genetic, epigenetic and developmental mechanisms of psychiatric disease. His areas of clinical expertise are in schizophrenia and brain stimulation.