People

Join us in the beautiful north-east of England!

If you are interested in working with us, drop me a line at vivek.nityananda [at sign] newcastle.ac.uk and we can discuss possibilities.

CURRENT LAB MEMBERS

LAB TECHNICIAN

POSTDOCS

PHD STUDENTS

Olga Procenko: Olga joined the lab in September 2020. She has a Master’s from Queen Mary University of London. Her project investigates how affective states influence visual perception in bumblebees.

Matthew Quinn: Matthew is based at Durham University where he began his PhD research on visual processing in mosquito larvae in January 2021. The main supervisor on the project is Olena Riabinina, with Natalie Hempel de Ibarra (University of Exeter) and myself as co-supervisors.

POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS

Beth Green: Beth is an MSci student who joined the lab in January 2022. Her project looks at how stress changes bee behaviour.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

PAST LAB MEMBERS

POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS

Mitsiou Grelot-Valade: Mitsiou joined the lab from March to June 2022. Her project investigated the effect of pesticides on bumblebee attention and multi-tasking. The project was part of her Master’s in Behavioural Biology at the University of Rennes.

Marin Nicolas: Marin joined the lab from March to June 2022. His project investigated the effect of reward value on bumblebee attention. The project was part of his Master’s in Behavioural Biology at the University of Rennes.

Skye Riddell: Skye joined the lab from January to June 2022. Her project investigate whether prey iridescence interfered with predation by praying mantises. This project was run in collaboration with John Sklehorn and Karin Kjernsmo.

Marion Callendret: Marion was in the lab from January to June 2021 on an Erasmus scholarship. Her project is investigating the influence of bottum-up cues on bumblebee visual attention. The project was part of her Master’s in Behavioural Biology at the University of Rennes.

Vera Vinken, Kelsey Bezaire, Sol Lucas, Jack Hardman: Vera, Kelsey, Sol and Jack have all run rotation projects in the lab as part of their Leverhulme Behavioural Informatics PhD program. Their project was a collaboration with Prof Stephen McGough at the School of Computing comparing mechanisms of generalization between bumblebees and artifical neural networks.

Ruairidh Hinchcliffe: Ruairidh worked on a project with us from February to July 2020, investigating the influence of competition on overconfidence in anonymous virtual environments. The project is part of his MRes in Evolution and Human Behaviour

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Chloe Sowells: Chloe joined the lab from January to March 2022. Her project investigated how bottom-up cuing affect bee visual discrimination.

Charlie Smith: Charlier joined the lab from September 2021 to March 2022. His project investigated how choice of task affect overconfidence in the task.

Karolina Tarapata: Karolina joined the lab from September 2020 to March 2021. Her project investigated how learning influences visual attention in bumblebees.

Tan Yi Ting: Yi Ting worked with us for her undergraduate project investigating selective spatial attention in mantises from January to April 2020.

Edward Hayden: Ed did his undergraduate project in the lab from September 2019 to January 2020 investigating how interest in and perceived career importance of a skill influenced overconfidence in that skill .