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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Davidson, J.D., Vishwakarma, M., Smith, M.L., (2021) Hierarchical Approach for Comparing Collective Behavior Across Scales: Cellular Systems to Honey Bee Colonies Front. Ecol. Evol. 9:581222.