Overview PhD projects 2019

This was the list of our 2019 PhD projects. Application deadline was Jan 15! New projects will be announced again Mid-November.

Open PhD positions for own proposal elaboration within Organismal Biology

Keywords Organismal Biology, behaviour, ecology, evolution, physiology, neurobiology
Supervisor: IMPRS faculty member, to be contacted with an own research proposal

Collective sensory experience drives olfactory coding

Keywords olfactory coding, honeybees, calcium imaging, large data analysis, animal behaviour

Main advisor Giovanni Galizia, University of Konstanz more

About the molecular fundations of olfaction: Is coding combinatorial or multidimensional?

Keywords olfactory coding, honeybees, calcium imaging, large data analysis, animal behaviour

Main advisor Giovanni Galizia, University of Konstanz

The role of testosterone for socio-sexual behaviours of domestic chicken

Keywords Sexual development, chicken brain, transgenic, social behaviour, telemetric

Main advisor Manfred Gahr, MPIO more

The interaction between social behaviour and physical structures in coral reef fishes

Keywords coral reef fish, social behaviour, ecological engineering, physical structure, SCUBA, machine-learning, animal tracking, social network analysis

Main supervisor Alex Jordan, MPI for Ornithology

Quantitative comparison of behavioural evolution in social fishes

Keywords cichlid fishes, social behaviour, socio-cognitive skills, SCUBA, machine-learning, animal tracking, social network analysis, Lake Tanganyika

Main supervisor Alex Jordan, MPI for Ornithology

Collective sensing of the resource landscape in migratory fruit bats

Keywords: migration, animal tracking, GPS, foraging, energetic expenditure, sensory networks

Advisors: Teague O'Mara, Dina Dechmann and Martin Wikelski, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Radolfzell

Collective migration in a long-distance social migrant

Keywords white storks, collective migration, animal tracking, group coordination, flight energetics

Main supervisor Andrea Flack, MPI for Ornithology

Computational Approaches to the Experimental Study of Animal Collectives

Keywords self-organization, swarm, school, behavior, information, automated tracking, machine learning, virtual reality, inverse methodologies.

Main adviser Iain Couzin, MPI for Ornithology + University of Konstanz

Collective Animal Behaviour

Keywords self-organization, swarm, schooling, behavior, information, fish, locusts, birds, tracking, computer vision, virtual reality, self-organization, decision-making, individual differences, evolution

Main adviser Iain Couzin, MPI for Ornithology + University of Konstanz

3 positions - the neurobiological and behavioural basis of swarming in locusts

Keywords: Locust swarm, virtual reality, collective behaviour, sensory coding, active sensing, olfaction, decision making
Main advisors:
Giovanni Galizia, University of Konstanz
Einat Couzin-Fuchs, University of Konstanz
Iain Couzin, University of Konstanz + MPI for Ornithology more

Social learning and cultural inheritance in birds, Parus major

Keywords: collective behaviour, social learning, animal culture, birds, cognitive ecology
Main advisor: Lucy Aplin, MPI for Ornithology

Interested in one of these PhD projects? Apply here!

The Max Planck Society and the University of Konstanz are equal opportunity employers and are committed to increasing the number of individuals with disabilities in their workforce and therefore we encourage applications from such qualified individuals. Furthermore, we seek to increase the number of women in those areas where they are underrepresented and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply.