Category: Couzin

Armin Bahl

Armin seeks to understand the nervous system computations underlying animal decision-making. His work focuses on the larval zebrafish, a small and almost perfectly translucent vertebrate with a brain similar to ours. Zebrafish have a rich and innately present behavioral repertoire and are amenable to genetic modifications. These features allow Armin’s group to combine precise tracking experiments, cognitive algorithmic modeling, whole-brain activity imaging, genomic sequencing, and targeted circuit manipulations, to in detail dissect the neural basis of decision-making.

Stewardship of global collective behavior

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, in revision in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Kajal Kumari

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

Michael Mende

I am head of the animal facility in Iain’s department, as well as responsible for work- and laser- safety. I further coordinate the day-to-day tasks in the labs. I received my Diploma in Biology and Doctorate in Natural Sciences from the Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany. During my first PostDoc, in the lab of Andrea Streit, King’s College London, UK, I studied inner ear development in the chick embryo. I moved on to looking into synapse formation and circuit homeostasis in the mouse spinal cord,

Mark Bugden

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.