PROGRAM

Renata S. Sousa-Lima

Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), head of the EcoAcoustic Research Hub / Laboratory of Bioacoustics and of the Ecology Graduate School. Renata supervises undergraduate, graduate students, and post-docs in the Psychobiology and Ecology Programs focusing in behavioral ecology, animal communication, wildlife conservation, human impacts, bioacoustics, and has pioneered the field of ecoacoustics and soundscape ecology in Brazil. She is a Bachelor in Zoology, an Education Specialist in Biology, and a Master in Ecology, Conservation and Management of Wildlife (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil), and a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior (Cornell University, USA).

Eva Ringler

Eva Ringler is a professor at the University of Bern, where she heads the Department of Behavioral Ecology at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. She received her PhD in Evolutionary Biology in 2011 from the University of Vienna, and conducted her post-doctoral research at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna (Austria) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, USA). She was appointed as professor to the University of Bern in August 2020. Eva Ringler and her research group are interested in understanding variation in animal behaviour from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. In their research, they mainly focus on Neotropical poison frogs and glassfrogs, and combine experiments and long-term monitoring in the field with targeted behavioral experiments under controlled laboratory conditions, to answer broad questions in Behavioural Ecology and Animal Cognition.

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi is a conservation scientist and ecologist, best known for his work on snow leopards and human-wildlife coexistence in the high Himalaya. As the Director of the India Program for the Snow Leopard Trust and a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), his work focuses on the interactions between large carnivores, their wild prey, and traditional livestock herding and farming communities. His interdisciplinary research identified the causes of livestock predation by snow leopards and developed solutions to minimize conflict, promoting participatory conservation policies. He is a National Geographic Explorer and a recipient of the British Ecological Society’s Southwood Prize (2013). He is a Fellow of the British Ecological Society and a Global Fellow of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Studies (CIFAR).

Felicity Muth

Originally from the UK, Felicity Muth is currently an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. Her lab group are broadly interested in animal behavior and cognition, especially aspects of learning and memory that have a clear function in the natural world. They largely study this in captive and wild bumblebees, currently funded by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. Beyond research, Muth is a strong proponent of science communication in all its forms: most recently she has written a children’s book to spread knowledge of bee diversity.

Daniela C. Rößler

Fueled by curiosity and a deep love of natural history, Daniela Rößler’s academic career began with the study of visual signals and anti-predator adaptations in amphibians before shifting to arachnids—focusing on the remarkable cognitive abilities of jumping spiders. During her postdoc, Daniela discovered a REM-like sleep state in spiders and, building on this finding, she established a research group that uses integrative field, lab, and comparative approaches to investigate the function, ecology, and evolution of sleep across the spider tree of life. Her overarching goal is to highlight the influence of sleep on behavior more broadly and across taxa—an often-overlooked dimension in behavioral ecology.

Leigh W. Simmons

Leigh Simmons is Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia. He received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in  1986 and held a series of research fellowships at the University of Liverpool before moving to Australia in 1995. His research is focused on pre and postmating sexual selection acting on the reproductive strategies of males and females, and on the behavioral and morphological traits that contribute to fitness, from the whole organism to its gametes. Leigh has been an active contributor to the International Society for Behavioral Ecology, hosting the 13th Congress in Perth in 2010 and serving as Editor in Chief of Behavioral Ecology from 2012-2022.

The  ISBE Social Party will be held on Thursday, July 23rd. A lively evening featuring food, music and plenty of opportunities for conversation to connect with fellow delegates will take place at ONE, a lovely setting inside the Valentino park.

Attendance to the event requires a separate ticket, which must be purchased in advance during Registration. Student and senior members tickets  are available, as well as tickets for accompanying persons.