Professor Iain D. Couzin

The New York Times article From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm said

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
 
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
 
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
 
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”

Professor Iain D. Couzin, BSc, Ph.D., M.A. is Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University and Royal Society University Research Fellow, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.
 
Research in his laboratory involves the study of adaptive collective phenomena in animal groups such as bird flocks, fish schools, and insect swarms using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. Animal groups frequently exhibit complex and coordinated collective behaviors that result from social interactions among individuals. Since they are both observable and manipulable, such groups are ideal subjects with which to develop and test mathematical models that link the behavior of small components with the functioning and overall efficiency of their dynamic group-level properties. They provide unrivalled opportunities to quantify the behavior of individual components within the context of the collective.
 
Iain authored Collective minds: By tapping into social cues, individuals in a group may gain access to higher-order computational capacities that mirror the group’s responses to its environment and Behavioral ecology: social organization in fission-fusion societies, and coauthored Cannibal crickets on a forced march for protein and salt, Effective leadership and decision making in animal groups on the move, Antbirds parasitize foraging army ants, Self-organization and collective behavior of vertebrates, and Collective memory and spatial sorting in animal groups. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Iain earned his B.Sc. in Biology (1st class honors) from University of St. Andrews, his Ph.D. in “Collective Animal Behavior” from University of Bath, and his M.A. from Balliol College, University of Oxford.
 
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