I am really grateful to UC for funding an internal grant that will support new social experiments with our quail system and the establishment of a brand new system where we will work on betta fish! My goal is to look at how both species respond to social perturbations and compare these results to those that my team has already collected for parakeets.
You can read more about this work here.
I’ll be recruiting undergrads to help with this research soon! Visit this page for information.
From UC’s Office of Research Press Release: (see the full version here)
Congratulations URC Faculty Scholars Research Awardees & Finalists!
The URC Faculty Scholars Research Awards Program builds on the legacy of the University Research Council (URC), which is the university’s oldest and most prestigious internal funding program. It recognizes promising early-career individual faculty at UC who are proposing transformative, future-shaping ideas that are either discipline-focused or interdisciplinary in nature.
Each year, following a two-stage application and evaluation process, eight UC faculty members within the areas of Arts & Humanities, Behavioral & Social Sciences, Life Sciences, and Physical Science & Engineering are awarded $25,000 for 24 months.
Congratulations to the following awardees and finalists!
LIFE SCIENCES
AWARDEES
Elizabeth Hobson
Biological Sciences
College of Arts & Sciences
Consequences of experimental power vacuums in the rise & fall of hierarchical societies
“Social species across many animals (including humans) benefit in many ways from living in groups, but these groups are dynamic and require individuals to constantly adapt to new social environments. To better understand the causative factors underlying societal change, we need to experiment with power dynamics within a range of social systems across different species. In this project, I will compare social dynamics in new experiments with two species (quail and fish) to existing data from social experiments my lab has already conducted on parakeets to determine similarities and differences in how individuals respond to changes in power dynamics. Scientifically, this approach will also allow us to test how differences in factors like memory, recognition, and inference across the three species are important for understanding both the sociality and cognition of the different species; more broadly, the project will also provide valuable research experiences and training in computational analysis methods to undergraduate students.”
