News

Congratulations to Raven on a really fun empirical/modeling paper on movement and inferences about sociality in vampire bats. This work was part of the NSF grant my lab has with Gerry Carter.  Open access link to paper Abstract Social structure can emerge from hierarchically embedded scales of movement, where movement ...
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With an awesome team, led by founding editor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, I'm excited to have our new journal launched today! Our first papers with npj Complexity are now posted. Visit this link to read our founding editorial, where we lay out our plans for the journal. The path of complexity Laurent ...
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I will be teaching my “Analytical Tools for Behavior” course (BIOL3017) in Fall 2024. This is a beginner-friendly learn-to-code course based around animal behavior concepts and using data from penguins. There is increasing awareness that data science and computational thinking are critical skills for undergraduates to develop. The goal of ...
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We are recruiting student volunteers or work/study students to help us provide daily care to our Bobwhite quail in the lab. Students should be able to commit to a minimum of 3 hours of work per week. Duties will include changing food and water, providing health checks, and potentially assisting ...
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We are recruiting student volunteers or work/study students to help with data collection in the lab. Work with PhD student Sanjay Prasher to assist in his research on bobwhite quail sociality. Sanjay recorded hours of video of quail moving around and interacting with each other in a flight pen. We're ...
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Inferred Attractiveness: A generalized mechanism for sexual selection that can maintain variation in traits and preferences over time Emily H. DuVal, Courtney L. Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Maria R. Servedio PLOS Biology: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002269 Abstract: Sexual selection by mate choice is a powerful force that can lead to evolutionary change, and ...
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Grace has a new paper now out in PLOS Computational Biology! Individual identity information persists in learned calls of introduced parrot populations Grace Smith-Vidaurre , Valeria Pérez-Marrufo, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Alejandro Salinas-Melgoza, Timothy F. Wright Abstract Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in learned communication signals, such ...
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Challenges and opportunities to build quantitative self-confidence in biologists  Kim Cuddington, Karen C Abbott, Frederick R Adler, Mehmet Aydeniz, Rene Dale, Louis J Gross, Alan Hastings, Elizabeth A Hobson, Vadim A Karatayev, Alexander Killion, Aasakiran Madamanchi, Michelle L Marraffini, Audrey L McCombs, Widodo Samyono, Shin-Han Shiu, Karen H Watanabe, Easton ...
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Our new paper, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, was published in the theme issue "Mixed-species groups and aggregations: shaping ecological and behavioural patterns and processes" (compiled and edited by Nora V. Carlson, Todd M. Freeberg, Eben Goodale, and Anne Heloise Theo) in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.  All ...
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Grace just signed her offer and will be starting a tenure track faculty job at Michigan State in 2024!!! This is so exciting and I am really looking forward to continuing our collaboration and seeing Grace build her group. She'll be recruiting soon! See her website for more details. Grace ...
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A new paper, led by Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel, was just published! In this paper, we wanted to test whether social history was an important factor in rank dynamics in captive groups of monk parakeets. My previous results, using computational approaches, suggested that this was the case, ...
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Mike Miller did a great press release for our recent paper on rank dynamics and social history in monk parakeets. Thanks Mike! See the published paper here (or access our preprint for free here) See the full press release here These birds vacation at their peril Gregarious monk parakeets lose ...
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Huge congratulations to Darby for winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!! Darby will join my lab as a PhD student in Fall 2023 and will work on merging conservation practices with animal behavior and sociality in parrots. She joins the lab after two years as a post-bac on our parakeet ...
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I am very grateful to UC for funding an internal grant proposal to support new work with our bobwhite quail.  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 Collaborative Research ...
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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 ...
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Brent Stoffer and I are working on a new initiative to incorporate data science and coding into UC's introductory biology course. We received funding from UC to start implementing these changes. See the overview of our plans in the video here I developed a module for the course in 2021 ...
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We were really excited to have the chance to talk with Ann Thompson from WXVU recently about some of our work with bobwhite quail in the lab. Read more about our work with "the bobs" below, or check out the recording! (Full story available here)  This bobwhite quail 'recording studio' ...
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Hobson Lab Capstone Undergraduate student Sophia Clemen just got her first research funding! She was awarded an undergraduate research fellowship to fund some of her capstone project work with "the bobs", our bobwhite quail system. Sophia will be studying their vocalizations and will be recording their "bob-white" calls in the ...
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Hobson Lab PhD Candidate Sanjay Prasher and Undergrad Capstone student Sophia Clemen both presented their research as posters at the 2022 Sensorium conference on Sensory Biology and Ecology here at the University of Cincinnati. Sanjay presented on some of his new results from an agent-based model. Sophia presented on her ...
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Mike Miller did a nice overview of my recent paper "A Low-Cost Solution for Documenting, Tracking, and Verifying Cage-Level Animal Husbandry Tasks Using Wireless QR Scanners and Cloud-Based Spreadsheets". Read the full text here. UC lab relies on quality control for quail UC assistant professor comes up with novel system ...
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The first paper on our bobwhite quail research is out! You can read the full open-access version here in Animal Behavior and Cognition. This paper explains the quality control system we have for tracking and double-checking our animal care for "the bobs". You can read more about our work with ...
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The Hobson Lab at the University of Cincinnati is recruiting 1-3 field assistants to collect data and run social experiments with captive groups of Monk Parakeets in large outdoor flight pens. Dates The field season is 5 months. Fieldwork will start in the beginning of January 2023 and end by ...
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Congratulations to Kalem Schrock, who presented his work on the Sociality Game at the recent National Diversity in STEM conference in Puerto Rico! Kalem was an REU student in my lab this summer and did a great job on a fun interdisciplinary project where we are developing an online multiplayer game ...
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I was very excited a resume giving invited talks in person this fall! I was invited to give a colloquium talk at McMaster Psychology (thanks to Reuven Dukas for the invitation!) and to Texas A&M Biology (thanks to Courtney Fitzpatrick for the invitation!). I really enjoyed both visits and getting ...
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My postdoc Grace Smith-Vidaurre just posted a new preprint about her work with monk parakeet vocalizations. The preprint is posted on EcoEvoRxiv. Abstract Animals can actively encode different types of identity information in communication signals, such as group membership, individual identity, or social status. The social environments in which animals ...
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