Research

I study the neural mechanisms of animal social behaviour and focus on how changes in neural circuits results in natural variation in social phenotypes in animals. Behaviour may change within the lifetime of an animal as a result of experience, or populations or closely related species may exhibit differences in social behaviour, for example as a result of differences in local ecology including food availability, predation or parasites. I am interested in such phenotypic variation - over short and long timescales - and how the underlying neurobiology mediates stable differences in social behaviour.