Staff Profile

About me

I am interested in how animals acquire and use information in their environments and how these processes shape foraging decisions. To study this, I use techniques and concepts from ethology, psychology, and computer science, and work with animals both in the lab and in their natural environments. In recent years I have also become interested in how ideas spread in science, and how these dynamics influence the kinds of hypotheses we test when studying animal behaviour and cognition.

History

I received a PhD in Biology from the University of St Andrews in 2016, where I studied spatial memory in wild hummingbirds. Following this, I worked a number of part-time jobs at St Andrews for 3 years, including teaching undergraduate Biology, working as the editorial assistant for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and working as an Insect technician. In 2019 I moved to the University of Stirling in 2019 to investigate buzz-pollination in bumblebees, then returned to St Andrews in 2022 as a fixed term lecturer in Animal Cognition before joining the University of Lincoln as a Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare in 2023. Finally I joined the Newcastle University in 2024 as a Lecturer in Psychology.

Qualifications

2011-2016      University of St Andrews PhD in Biology: Small-scale navigation by wild hummingbirds

2009-2010      University of Exeter MSc Animal Behaviour with Distinction

2005-2009      Oxford University BA Biological Sciences. 2.1

Stay tuned for updates in the next few months as I get set up in Newcastle!

Spatial Cognition in Hummingbirds

For the past 10 years I have studied small-scale navigation in Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus). To forage effectively, these little birds remember individual flowers within the territory. The hummingbirds do not remember flowers in terms of their physical appearance, but instead remember the spatial location of a flower within the territory. Very little is known about how the hummingbirds remember the spatial location of a flower, the cues they use, and how this relates to navigation in other animals. Continuing work I started during my PhD, I have examined how hummingbirds use environmental information, particularly visual cues, to return to the location of a flower. Working in the Canadian Rockies over the summer, we use field experiments to tease apart what the hummingbirds remembered about flower locations. In recent years we have used visual tracking software to extract and analyse flight paths, and model the potential visual information available to the birds using cutting-edge photogrammetry tools. These methods allow us to analyse the behaviour and visual cues used by hummingbirds in unprecedented detail.

PSY1015 - Principles of Evolution, Genetics and Behavioural Development