Events at the MPIAB

Reciprocity in animals

Institute Seminar by Gerry Carter
  • Date: May 6, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Gerry Carter
  • I'm an Associate Professor at Princeton University, a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I was previously an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, a Humboldt Fellow at MPI-AB (then Ornithology) in Konstanz, and a Smithsonian Postdoc Fellow at STRI. I did my PhD with Jerry Wilkinson at the University of Maryland. Outside work, my hobbies are that my kids are 4 and 2 years old.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: ehurme@ab.mpg.de
Reciprocity has been a controversial topic in behavioral ecology for over 40 years. How often is cooperation between animals stabilized by conditional responses to each partner's helping (reciprocity)? How often are cooperative investments explained by product returns (pseudo-reciprocity)? I argue that, in many real-world cases, helping increases both reciprocal help and byproduct returns. When ... [more]

Natural history museums: bridging research and society

Rado Seminar by Paquita Hoeck + Lukas Keller
Natural history and science museums are more than just showcases for scientific facts - they are dynamic interfaces between research and society. They captivate a wide audience, often providing the first contact of children with science and research. They make complex scientific topics tangible and they promote a dialog over current research questions. But how are exciting exhibitions created and ... [more]

Unravelling the Past and Present: Marine Phytoplankton Population Dynamics in the face of the Anthropocene

Doctoral defense by Alexandra Schmidt, supervised by Laura Epp
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The role of epigenetic inheritance in rapid evolutionary adaptation of invasive plants

Doctoral defense by Jasmin Herden, supervised by Mark van Kleunen
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Institute Seminar by Blair Costelloe

Institute Seminar by Blair Costelloe
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Working in Germany – Labour Market and Job Search Strategies for International and German STEM Researchers

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IMPRS PhD student retreat 2025

IMPRS PhD student retreat 2025
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Knowledge and culture in savannah elephants: What do we know, and what should we do next?

Institute Seminar by Lucy Bates
  • Date: May 20, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Lucy Bates
  • My research considers the evolution of social skills and cognition in mammals, particularly elephants. My current work concerns the acquisition of information and the role of ‘knowledgeable’ individuals in elephant society. This has implications for elephant conservation and management policy, which is an important part of my interest, and I endeavour to use my research to contribute to and enable sustainable, fair and effective conservation practices. My passion for studying elephant cognition began with my first post-doctoral research position, conducted between 2005 and 2008 at the University of St Andrews. Working with Professor Dick Byrne, I conducted some of the first field studies exploring social cognition in savannah elephants, working in collaboration with the Amboseli Trust for Elephants. Before that I completed my PhD on chimpanzee behavioural ecology, also at St Andrews. After the post-doc I took a break from academia, working as a consultant for various conservation projects in southern Africa between 2009 and 2015 before returning to research with a part-time Daphne Jackson Trust Fellowship held at the University of Sussex, working alongside Professor Karen McComb. I then worked as an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, before joining the University of Portsmouth as a (part-time) lecturer in 2022.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: rthillaikumar@ab.mpg.de
In this talk, I will explore what we know about the acquisition of information and the role of knowledgeable individuals in elephant society. It is something of a mantra for elephant biologists that older elephants are ‘repositories of knowledge’, but I will question what this means in two ways. Firstly, by exploring the evidence we currently have about social (versus individual) acquisition of ... [more]

Neuroethology of African Cichlids: Environmental and Social Influences on Neuroanatomical Variation

Doctoral defense by Bin Ma, supervised by Alex Jordan
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Institute Seminar by Adwait Deshpande

Institute Seminar by Adwait Deshpande
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Institute Seminar by Caitlin Wells

Institute Seminar by Caitlin Wells
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Blackcap migration - adaptation in time and space

Institute Seminar by Miriam Liedvogel
  • Date: Jun 17, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Miriam Liedvogel
  • Miriam Liedvogel is Director of the Institute of Avian Research “Vogelwarte Helgoland” and Professor of Ornithology at Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She is fascinated by the phenomenon of bird migration and with her research asks, how this fascinating behaviour is controlled, coordinated and regulated on the molecular level? To address this question, she links careful behavioural observation and state-of-the-art tracking migration in the wild to carefully characterise migratory behaviour under controlled conditions as well as free flying birds, with whole genome sequencing and gene expression approaches to match genotype to phenotype. Her work is funded through the European Commission (Marie Curie Fellowship), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Feodor Lynen Fellowship), the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Max Planck Society (MPG). Miriam has been awarded various prices and fellowships, e.g. an award for outstanding supervision by the Universitätsgesellschaft Oldenburg (UGO), the JED Williams Medal for her committee work. Besides regularly talking at both national and international scientific conferences, Miriam enjoys to communicate science to children and the general public.
  • Location: Bückle St. 5a, 78467 Konstanz
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Bücklestrasse + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: aflack@ab.mpg.de
Understanding the genetics of bird migration is a long-standing goal in evolutionary biology. Blackcaps Sylvia atricapilla are ideal for this work as different populations exhibit enormous difference in migratory behaviour and little else. We characterize (i) phenotype, population structure and demographic history the blackcap, and (ii) identify sequence variants and signaling pathways that are ... [more]

Genomic Pillars of the Social Brain: Lessons from the Honey Bee

Institute Seminar by Gene Robinson
  • Institute seminar moved to MONDAY
  • Date: Jun 23, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Gene Robinson
  • Gene E. Robinson (Ph.D., Cornell University, 1986) joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He holds a University Swanlund Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professorship, is director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), and former director of the University's Neuroscience Program. Robinson pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, has been honored with the Wolf Prize in Agriculture, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and American Philosophical Society.
  • Location: MPI-AB Möggingen
  • Room: Seminar room MPI-AB Möggingen + Online
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
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Institute Seminar by Clara Hozer

Institute Seminar by Clara Hozer
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Scientific Writing (workshop)

2-tägiger Kurs
  • Start: Jul 3, 2025
  • End: Jul 4, 2025
  • Speaker: Brian Cusack, Science Craft
  • Dr. Brian Cusack comes from Cork, Ireland and received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Trinity College, Dublin in 2007. During his Ph.D. Brian received the kind of mentoring that he continues to consider as the gold-standard for graduate students. After completing his first postdoc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Brian conducted post-doctoral research in evolutionary genomics at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In February 2012, together with Rick Scavetta, Brian co-founded Science Craft in Berlin. Since then Brian has provided high-level training workshops for more than a thousand researchers throughout Germany as well as in Norway and China.
  • Location: tba
  • Room: tba
  • Host: IMPRS
  • Contact: imprs@uni-konstanz.de
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Getting Published and Mastering Peer Review (workshop)

  • Start: Jul 7, 2025
  • End: Jul 8, 2025
  • Speaker: Brian Cusack, Science Craft
  • Dr. Brian Cusack comes from Cork, Ireland and received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Trinity College, Dublin in 2007. During his Ph.D. Brian received the kind of mentoring that he continues to consider as the gold-standard for graduate students. After completing his first postdoc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Brian conducted post-doctoral research in evolutionary genomics at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In February 2012, together with Rick Scavetta, Brian co-founded Science Craft in Berlin. Since then Brian has provided high-level training workshops for more than a thousand researchers throughout Germany as well as in Norway and China.
  • Location: tba
  • Room: tba
  • Host: IMPRS
  • Contact: imprs@uni-konstanz.de
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Courtship complexity: insights from Neotropical birds

Institute Seminar by Lilian Manica
  • Date: Jul 8, 2025
  • Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Lilian Manica
  • Lilian Tonelli Manica is a professor in the Department of Zoology at the Federal University of Paraná and advise students at the Graduate Program in Zoology and Graduate Program in Ecology and Conservation of the same institution. She coordinates the Behavioural Ecology and Ornithology Lab, developing projects to understand the importance of immediate and evolutionary mechanisms in the production of bird behaviors. Her interests include sexual selection, communication, migration, mating systems and conservation. Her work explores, among other topics, cooperative displays in manakins, the relationship between parasitism and ornamentation, and environmental impacts on bird ecology.
  • Location: University of Konstanz + online
  • Room: ZT 702
  • Host: Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
  • Contact: dperez@ab.mpg.de
Courtship displays, driven by sexual selection, are fascinating behaviors across a wide range of animal taxa. Birds, in particular, serve as excellent study models due to their often multimodal sexual exhibitions, which involve various sensory modalities such as coloration, body movements, and vocalizations. In this lecture, I will share insights from my research on Neotropical bird species. My ... [more]

Institute Seminar by Genevieve Finerty

Institute Seminar by Genevieve Finerty
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Group-hunting and Multi-predator Feeding Aggregations in the Open Ocean

Rado Seminar by Jens Krause
Multi-predator feeding aggregations (MPFAs) are temporary co-occurrences of predators simultaneously exploiting the same prey resource. The open ocean is home to the largest and most diverse MPFAs on the planet, however, our knowledge of the mechanisms and functions driving the existence of MPFAs is heavily biased towards terrestrial systems. Terrestrial MPFAs typically occur at carrion and are ... [more]

Data Visualization with R - Mastering Visual Data Communication (online course)

  • Start: Nov 11, 2025 09:30 AM (Local Time Germany)
  • End: Nov 27, 2025 05:30 PM
  • Speaker: Rick Scavetta
  • Rick Scavetta has been operating as an independent workshop trainer, freelance data scientist, and co-founder since 2012. Under the name Scavetta Academy, Rick maintains a strong and recurring presence at prominent research institutes throughout Germany. These include several Max Planck Institutes and Excellence Clusters, covering diverse fields such as primatology, earth sciences, marine biology, molecular genetics, and behavioral psychology. With online courses featured on DataCamp, Rick's teachings have reached more than 200,000 students since 2016. Additionally, he has made contributions to advanced data science courses offered by O’Reilly and Manning.
  • Location: online
  • Host: IMPRS AND KONSTANZ RESEARCH SCHOOL
  • Contact: imprs@uni-konstanz.de
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