Speakers

Heiligenberg Lecture

Auke Ijspeert

Affiliation: EPFL, Switzerland

Investigating Feedforward and Feedback Control in Animal Locomotion Using Robots and Neuromechanical Simulations

Auke Ijspeert’s research interests are at the intersection between robotics and computational neuroscience. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to gain a better understanding of animal locomotion and movement control, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and locomotion controllers. He is also interested in assisting persons with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. With his colleagues, he has received numerous paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow, head of the Biorobotics Laboratory and has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh.

Huber Lecture

Catherine Dulac

Affiliation: Harvard University, USA

Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behavior

Catherine Dulac’s work combines cutting edge genetics, transcriptomics, physiology and imaging approaches to uncover the neural basis of instinctive social behaviors, a set of brain functions typically impaired in mental illness. She is a member of the US and French Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is a recipient of multiple awards including the Karl Spencer Lashley Award, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. She is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Keynote Speakers

Ajay Narendra

Affiliation: Macquarie University, Australia

Tiny Brains, True Bearings: Finding the Way Home in a Big World

Ajay Narendra specializes in invertebrate neuroethology. His research focuses on how ants, bees, and spiders navigate, learn, and remember spatial information within various temporal and ecological niches. His group investigates the behavioral, sensory, and neural adaptations that enable movement at the limits of size and light availability. Currently, he serves as the Co-Director of the Pollinator Futures Research Centre and holds the position of Vice-President of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behavior.

Joseph Parker

Affiliation: California Institute of Technology, USA

The Evolution of Symbiotic Entrenchment

Joseph Parker is an evolutionary biologist who has pioneered the study of rove beetles to investigate the evolution of symbiosis and species interactions. Originally from Swansea, Wales, he received a BSc from Imperial College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Currently, he is a Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the director of Caltech’s Center for Evolutionary Science. He is also a research associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History.

Lisa Fenk

Affiliation: MPI for Biological Intelligence, Germany

Mechanisms of Active Vision in Insects

Lisa Fenk is interested in the interaction of sensory processing with active sensor movements. Her lab focuses on retinal movements in Drosophila as a relatively simple model for active vision and combines these efforts with comparative experiments in other species. 

She studied physics and French before switching to neurobiology for her PhD at the University of Vienna. She conducted postdoctoral work at the Research Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Austria and the Rockefeller University in NY. In 2021, she became a Lise Meitner Research Group Leader at the MPI for Biological Intelligence.

Michael Long

Affiliation: NYU Grossman School of Medicine, USA

Neural Circuits for Interactive Communication

Michael Long focuses his attention on the neural circuits underlying skilled movements, often in the service of vocal interactions. To accomplish this, the Long lab has taken a comparative approach, examining relevant mechanisms in the songbird, the parrot, a singing neotropical rodent, and humans. He is the Thomas and Susanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Vice Chair for Education at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He completed his graduate studies with Barry Connors at Brown University and his postdoctoral work with Michale Fee at MIT.

Laura Quintana

Affiliation: Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Uruguay

Neurosteroids Regulating Year-Round Aggression: Insights from Electric Fish

Laura Quintana investigates the hormonal regulation of social behavior, with a focus on seasonal mechanisms underlying aggression. She studies Gymnotus omarorum, a wild weakly electric fish that exhibits territorial aggression both during and outside the breeding season. Her research integrates fieldwork with behavioral pharmacology and molecular approaches to reveal how seasonal plasticity in neuroendocrine mechanisms – particularly brain-derived estrogens in the social brain network- regulates this year-round aggression. She leads the Neural Basis of Behavior Lab at the Instituto Clemente Estable.

Maud Baldwin

Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Germany

Evolution of the Taste System in Vertebrates

Maude Baldwin studies the evolution of diverse sensory and physiological innovations across the vertebrate phylogeny. After obtaining an undergraduate degree from NYU studying English and history, she took science courses through New York’s CUNY system, and received her PhD in 2015 from Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. She is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Munich.

Emily Standen

Affiliation: University of Ottawa, Canada

Elongate Swimming Helps Explain Relationships Between Neurocontrol, Body Mechanics and the External Environment

Emily Standen’s recent research focuses on how one neural control system can drive effective locomotion in both water and on land. To define this, she uses comparative and evolutionary biomechanics to explore the flexibility of animal systems to locomote across vastly different environments. She collaborates widely to bring robotics and computational modeling to her questions and has delivered keynotes at global conferences on topics from evolutionary plasticity to embodied intelligence.