Animal Behavior Graduate Group Series: "How (not) to train your titi: lessons from four months of being thwarted by a bunch of one-kilogram monkeys" and "Thinking like a fish: Diving into the struggle of designing a cognitive assay that works"

Isabel Kier, PhD Student, UC Davis, presents "How (not) to train your titi: lessons from four months of being thwarted by a bunch of one-kilogram monkeys".

Izzy (she/her) is a second year PhD student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at UC Davis and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. In Dr. Karen Bales’ lab, she studies the social behavior, cognition, and pair bonding of coppery titi monkeys (Plecturocebus cupreus). She is especially interested in operant preference testing and predictors of pair bond strength. Outside of the lab, Izzy is the co-editor of the Science & Culture column in The Ethogram and a student in the Future Undergraduate Science Educators program. She is originally from upstate New York and is enjoying all that California has to offer.

Siobhan Calhoun, Laskowski Lab, PhD Student, UC Davis, presents "Thinking like a fish: Diving into the struggle of designing a cognitive assay that works".

Siobhan is a second year PhD student in Dr. Kate Laskowski's lab in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group. She is interested in how environmental stressors impact cognitive ability and is currently working on designing a learning assay for the lab study species, the Amazon moll (Poecilia formosa). She is also fascinated by epigenetic processes and hopes to study some of the mechanisms underlying parental effects in her future research. Outside of the lab, she is a co-editor of Young Explorers column for the UC Davis Ethogram Blog and the activity lead coordinator for STEM Squad!

Host: Dr. Stacey Combes (sacombes@ucdavis.edu)