Andrew Barron
Andrew Barron is a Professor, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research with Macquarie University’s Department of Biological Sciences. He has a PhD in Zoology from Cambridge University and has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2000) an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2014) and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship (2017). He is a comparative neuroscientist. He collaborates with philosophers, roboticists and computer scientists to study the mechanisms and evolution of cognition. His research is presently supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, The Australian Research Council, The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council from the UK and the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, Melbourne.
Marta Halina
Marta Halina is a University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. She received her PhD in Philosophy and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, in 2013 and was a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis before coming to Cambridge in 2014. Her current research focuses on issues related to nonhuman animal mindreading, ape gestural communication, and mechanistic explanation in biology.
Marta also co-directs the Animal-AI Olympics project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, which benchmarks current AI against a variety of animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks.
Additionally, Marta is a fellow of Selwyn College where she is Director of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the Psychological and Behavioural Sciences (PBS).
David Harrison
David Harrison is a PhD candidate in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge as well as a Research Assistant at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence. His research is situated at the intersection of philosophy, biology, and the cognitive sciences—with a specific interest in evolutionary and biological approaches to subjectivity and mindedness. Additionally, David addresses foundational and theoretical questions in evolutionary biology, specifically involving the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.
Colin Klein
Colin Klein is a professor in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University, as well as a member of the ANU Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences and ANU’s Humanising Machine Intelligence Project. Before ANU, he taught at Macquarie University and was a visiting research fellow in the Centre for Consciousness at ANU. Colin’s research covers a wide range of foundational and conceptual problems in the sciences, from social epistemology, to consciousness research, and the philosophy of cognitive science.
Matishalin Patel
Matishalin is currently a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge where he works on models for intergroup conflict in Banded Mongooses. Before joining Cambridge, Matishalin was a DPhil student at Oxford University at the West Group, which addresses issues of adaptation and the social behaviour in evolutionary theory. His work specifically focuses on the evolution of social behaviours such as altruism and spite. In his work, Matishalin incorporates theoretical approaches using mathematical and computational techniques to build and analyse models of evolution. Additionally, he explores how Machine Learning algorithms might provide computational tools for the study evolutionary theory and biology.
Alexandre Duval
Alexandre Duval received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield in 2019 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia from 2020 to 2022. He will undertake a Postdoctoral Fellowship as part of The Major Transitions project at the Australian National University under the supervision of Colin Klein. Alexandre’s current research focuses on the nature of the geometric representations that human and non-human animals use to navigate the world. It is situated at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He also aims to show that studying such representations can help us make headway on a number of issues in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: e.g., the nativism/empiricism debate, the status of the massive modularity hypothesis, and the differences between human and non-human animal cognition.
Faelan Mourmourakis
Faelan Mourmourakis is a PhD student in the Department of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University. His research is situated on animal behaviour and cognition - predominantly focusing on comparative neurobiology between species of bees such as honey bees, Australian native bees and bumblebees. Faelan’s comparative research additionally, explores the evolution of brain anatomy, complex learning, and the philosophy of animal cognition with a focus on insects.
Cwyn Solvi
Cwyn Solvi is a comparative neuroethologist and currently a Docent at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research is broadly focused around understanding the cognitive abilities of animals, and their underlying mechanisms. She works with collaborators in Finland, Australia, UK, Italy, and China, across the fields of animal behaviour, ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and computational modelling, to examine how a variety of animals learn about, evaluate, experience, and understand their world. Her work is presently supported by The Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Arsham Nejad Kourki
Arsham is a PhD student at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. He is primarily interested in the evolution of complex organisation and how it can be understood through the lens of major evolutionary transitions theory across biological and sociocultural systems. He graduated with a BSc in Animal Biology from the University of Tehran in 2016, followed by an MA in Philosophy of Biological and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Bristol in 2017, and a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Bristol in 2021. He wrote his first PhD thesis on the Evolution of the Eumetazoan Body Plan. He is additionally interested in more general problems in the philosophy of biology and philosophy of science at large, including the theory of evolution, core concepts in biology (e.g. homology, individuality, agency), and evidential integration and inference.