Sensory perception in a changing world

Jane Francis is Director of the British Antarctic Survey. Her research interests are in past climate change, using fossils to determine the change from greenhouse to icehouse climates in the Arctic and Antarctica over the past 100 million years. She has undertaken over 15 scientific expeditions to the polar regions in search of fossil forests and information about climates of the past.

Hans-Otto Pörtner is a researcher in ecophysiology. He has established theory and evidence on effects of climate warming, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on (marine) animals and ecosystems. His efforts focus on linking biogeography and ecosystem functioning to molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms shaping organism tolerance and performance. In October 2015 he was elected Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II for its 6th assessment cycle. He is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences, the German Advisory Council on Global Change and a Web of Science highly cited researcher 2018 onward.

After being awarded PhD at Yokohama City University, and working as a JSPS postdoctoral fellow and Canon fellow, I am currently an Associate Professor at SOKENDAI, RCIES. My research interest is the visual world of insects. I’m mostly studying the neural system underlying visual perception in flower foraging butterflies by behavioral assay, electrophysiology and neuro-anatomy.

John Lesku is the Discipline Lead of Animal Biology & Health at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Prior to joining La Trobe, Dr Lesku had been based in Canada (BSc), the United States (MS), Germany (PhD), and Western Australia (Postdoctoral Research Fellow). He took up the position of Lecturer at La Trobe University in 2013. Since that time, Dr Lesku heads the Sleep Ecophysiology Group that offers a strong comparative perspective on the evolution of sleep physiology and sleep functions, with studies on birds, mammals, bony and cartilaginous fishes, and invertebrates. Furthermore, his group studies how pollution influences sleep in terrestrial and aquatic wildlife.

Hema Somanathan is a Principal Investigator at the School of Biology, IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India. Her group - BeeLab - works on bee sensory ecology and pollination biology in field sites across India. She employs a combination of behavioral experiments and field studies in her research. Her research includes little-studied Asian honeybees and nocturnal and diurnal carpenter bees.

I am interested in understanding how animals make decisions, and what information do they need to make those decisions. I have a keen interest in sensory systems of non-model insects. During my PhD with Dr. Robert A. Raguso at Cornell University, I explored the sensory ecology of pollinators like hawkmoths, beetles, and bees with a focus on their humidity sensing behavior. In my present role as a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Carolyn McBride's lab at Princeton University, I study the olfactory neurons mediating attraction to humans in the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti.

Professor Sadaf Farooqi (PhD, FRCP, FMedSci, FRS) is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally leading Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of how body weight is regulated. With colleagues, she discovered and characterised the first genetic disorders that cause severe childhood obesity and established that the principal driver of obesity in these conditions was a failure of the control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit. She has received a number of awards including the 2024 Outstanding Clinical Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society. In 2021, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of her exceptional contribution to science.

I am a physiological ecologist with expertise in the thermal biology of reptiles and insects. My primary research focuses on exploring how ecological drivers and evolutionary processes shape the physiological and behavioral responses of ectotherms to temperature change. 
I head the CL.I.M.E lab research group (climelab.net/) in the Dept. of Botany and Zoology and I am a core member of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University.

Suzie Currie is a comparative animal physiologist interested in how biotic factors, such as the social environment, influence how fish sense and respond to warming temperature. With her research team, she has worked on a wide variety of freshwater and marine species in temperate and tropical habitats. Suzie is an editorial board member of the Journal of Experimental Biology and was the lead editor in the most recent edition of the popular Physiology of Fishes. Suzie recently moved from Canada’s east coast (Acadia University, Nova Scotia) to the west as the Vice-Principal and Associate Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia.

Prof. Bakken obtained a PhD in physics at the William Marsh Rice University in Houston, TX, USA in 1970.  He then assumed a postdoctoral position with Dr. David M. Gates’ program in Biophysical Ecology at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, MO, USA, and continued as a Research Associate at the University of Michigan Biological Station, Ann Arbor, MI, USA to 1975.  He then joined the biology faculty of Indiana State University, retiring in 2015 as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.  His biophysical ecology research included thermoregulation, microclimate, and energetics.  Most recently, he applied his background in optical physics to thermal radiation sensing in pitvipers.  He remains active in research, collaborating with Dr. Rulon Clark at San Diego State University on rattlesnake research, and with Dr. Joy O’Keefe at the University of Illinois on bat conservation.  Otherwise, he enjoys birding photography with his wife (she counts, he shoots), flying his Cessna 172, and maintaining and upgrading their house and summer cabin. All 10 fingers have survived hammers, circular saws, and snakes.

Daniel Robert is a sensory ecologist interested in the biophysics of miniature sensory systems. He obtained his PhD in neurobiology at the University of Basel, Switzerland with Hugh Rowell. After a postdoc with Lee Miller at Odense University, Denmark, he spent time in Ivory Coast studying acoustic communication and tool use in wild chimpanzees. Then, he took up the opportunity to be a research associate in Ron Hoy's lab at Cornell University, Ithaca NY, and Ron Miles at the University of Binghamton NY. While subsequently working at the University of Zürich as a Swiss Science Foundation research professor, he was awarded the Schering Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where he convened the bio-inspired technologies study group. In 2001, he took up a professorship at the University of Bristol, where he has been since. Daniel is a recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and the founding director of the interdisciplinary Bristol Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information. Robert’s research involves interdisciplinary collaborations with sensory biologists, plant biologists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists. Daniel's investigations on arthropods have contributed to sensory research and nanoscale biological mechanics. His research at Cornell on parasitoid flies established the third principle of directional hearing, prompting the development of bio-inspired miniature microphones. More recently, Daniel and his team discovered that bumblebees can detect and learn floral electric fields. Their subsequent studies on spiders, wasps, caterpillars and treehoppers revealed the ubiquitous presence, roles and uses of electrostatics, establishing electroreception in air as a novel sensory modality for terrestrial animals.

I am a professor of Zoology at Turin University (ITALY), and my research focuses on communication and mimicry in multitrophic systems involving plants, microorganisms, and insects.

Robyn is a Reader in Comparative Anatomy and Behaviour at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research explores how animals move and sense, with a specific focus on the sense of touch, especially that of whisker touch. Robyn explores the functional significance of touch sensing in mammals and birds, and works with museums and zoos across the UK.

Manu Prakash is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University working in the field of physical biology and frugal science. He runs a curiosity driven lab at Stanford combining his passion for basic science while also developing ultra-affordable and accessible technologies that are used around the world for science education, research, and public health with the goal of democratizing access to scientific tools. Manu grew up in India and got his PhD from MIT, was a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows and a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.

Ana Širović is a marine bioacoustician, interested in using acoustic tools to answer ecological, population-level questions relevant to the management of highly exploited and endangered marine species. She also studies ocean noise and the effects of anthropogenic noise on marine life. She received a PhD in Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. After 23 years of various academic positions in the United States, she returned to Europe and is now a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

Dr. Fernanda Duque is a neuroethologist investigating the evolution of communication signals and sensory adaptations as well as the neural basis of multimodal communication in birds.

Eric Warrant is Professor of Zoology at the University of Lund in Sweden and is head of the Division of Sensory Biology (Department of Biology), Head of the Lund Vision Group and Past-President of the International Society of Neuroethology. Warrant leads an active research group studying vision and visual navigation in animals from extremely dim habitats (nocturnal and deep sea). In recent years he has turned his attention to the sensory basis of long-distance migration in nocturnal insects, particularly the role of the Earth’s magnetic field and the stars in migratory navigation.

Dr. Nathan Putman studies the movement ecology of marine organisms using analytical, modeling, laboratory, and field-based techniques. He has particular interest in magnetic navigation of marine animals, conducting research on sea turtles, salmon, eels, and sharks. He served as the invited guest editor for the 2022 special issue “Magnetosensation” in Journal of Comparative Physiology – A. He received his Ph.D. under the direction of Kenneth Lohmann at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and currently lives in Bryan, Texas USA and is a Senior Scientist at LGL Ecological Research Associates.