Interview: European Research Council Starting Grant 2021 Recipient Dr. Lucy Aplin

Behavioural Ecologist from Australia Dr. Lucy Aplin talks to EURAXESS Australia & New Zealand Regional Coordinator Nishant Shandilya about winning an ERC Starting Grant.
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Dr. Lucy Aplin is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. She studies social learning, social networks and culture, mostly in wild populations of birds. Broadly, she is interested in the interactions between cognition, social dynamics and transmission of behaviour.
Her current and past work has asked questions like: what is the process by which new behaviours emerge, spread and persist in animal populations? Can the cultural inheritance of information form an important component of a species’ life history? Can culture evolve? If so what is the relationship between cultural evolution, cognition and demographics?
Recently, she has added a second focus to her work, asking how social cognition and culture can influence the ability of species to exhibit rapid behavioral adaptation, through diffusion of innovation and cultural inheritance. Urban areas are perhaps the most highly modified and rapidly changing environments on the planet, and so she looks at this question in the context of urban persistence and colonisation.
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About the ERC Starting Grant:
Are you a talented early-career scientist who has already produced excellent supervised work, is ready to work independently and shows potential to be a research leader? The ERC Starting Grant could be for you.
Researchers of any nationality with 2-7 years of experience since completion of PhD (Extensions are possible under certain circumstances - see the latest ERC Work Programme), a scientific track record showing great promise and an excellent research proposal.
More information about the Starting Grants: erc.europa.eu/...
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