Since first studying animal behaviour I’ve been interested in the evolution of group living and also how groups form and are maintained over short time scales. My research has covered multiple aspects of group living, particularly the interaction between the behaviour of predators and social interactions in prey, and how inter-individual differences in groups interacts with group decision making. More recently, my research is including how predator and collective behaviour is affected by anthropogenic change in environmental variables, such as turbidity and anthropogenic noise. I use fish as a model system, both in the laboratory and in the field, because they are awesome.

Collective behaviour is a very inter-disciplinary area of research as it has importance to any organism that interacts socially, from microbes and plants all the way to humans. Although my training is very much in animal behaviour and behavioural ecology, I try to keep a broad perspective and collaborate with researchers in other fields. This includes physics and mathematics which provides a solid theoretical grounding for group processes and new analytic tools, and psychology which has a long history of studying social relationships in humans, many aspects of which apply to non-human animals as well.