I have diverse research interests in animal communication, cognition, collective behaviours, social evolution, and a strong inclination towards studying animals in natural settings.
During my PhD, I studied social learning and flexibility in the vocal communication of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa. My work involved both detailed natural observations and novel field experiments with the broader aim of gaining insights into potential precursors of human language.
Here in Konstanz,
Ahmed El Hady is a principal investigator and research scientist at the center for advanced study of collective behavior (Uni Konstanz). He is a neuroscientist who worked on a variety of problems from the biophysics of the action potential, the collective behavior of neuronal networks to the neural mechanisms underlying decision making in rats. His current research interests revolve around formal theories of social foraging across species and the implementation of large scale foraging experiments with rodents in the newly built imaging hangar at the University of Konstanz.
Smith, M.L., Davidson, J.D., Wild, B., Dormagen, D.M., Landgraf, T. & Couzin, I.D. (2021) The dominant axes of lifetime behavioral variation in honey bees, in review.
Poel, W., Daniels, B.C., Sosna, M.M.G., Twomey, C.R., Leblanc, S.P., Couzin, I.D. & Romanczuk, P. (2021) Subcritical escape waves in schooling fish, in review.
Bak-Coleman, J.B., Alfano, M., Barfuss, W., Bergstrom, C.T., Centeneo, M.A., Couzin, I.D., Galesic, M., Gersick, A.S., Jacquet, J., Kao, A.B., Patterson, T.S., Romanczuk, P., Rubenstein, D.I., Tombak, K.J., Van Bavel, J.J. & Weber, E.U. (2021) Stewardship of global collective behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (27) e2025764118.
Jungwirth A, Nuehrenberg P, Jordan A. 2021. On the importance of defendable resources for social evolution: applying new techniques to a long-standing question. Ethology in press
Etheredge RI, Schartl M, Jordan A. 2021. Decontextualized learning for interpretable hierarchical representations of visual patterns. Patterns 2(2):100193
Lein E, Jordan A. 2021. Studying the evolution of social behaviour in Darwin’s Dreampond – a case for the Lamprologine shell cichlids. Hydrobiologia.
Having earned a Bachelor’s in Biomedical Sciences, I went on to do a Master’s program in Ecology and Environment Sciences chasing butterflies and birds. I have diverse interests, which keep broadening as I get to try out new things. For my master’s dissertation, I studied choice preference in zebrafish in the presence of an ‘irrelevant’ alternative. During my PhD, I hope to study patterns in animal social networks in different contexts and scales and what drive such patterns
Mark has a background in mathematical and theoretical physics. He received his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 2019, where he specialised in string theory and higher-dimensional black holes. He spent 2 years at Charles University in Prague working as a postdoc, and is now moving to Konstanz to begin a project studying the collective behaviour of animals in the hydrodynamic limit using a fluid mechanics approach.