Dr Kyriakos Kareklas

Gulbenkian Institute of Science, Lisbon, Portugal

I graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Marine Biology in 2011 at Newcastle University’s School of Marine Science and Technology, before pursuing an Animal Behaviour Research Master’s (MRres) at the Institute of Neuroscience of the same university. During my MRes study (2011-2012) I worked with Tom Smulders and Daniel Nettle on a project on the function of water-induced finger-wrinkles in humans and  studied animal welfare, cognitive neuroscience and experimental design for cognitive and behavioural research. In 2013 I obtained a studentship from the Department for Education and Learning, Northern Ireland, to carry out a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast with Richard Holland and Robert Elwood on fish behaviour and cognition, focusing on individual behaviour, phenotypic plasticity and the effects of personality on object inspection and spatial learning in individuals and groups. Since graduating in 2017, I obtained funding from the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour to lead original research on contest behaviour and the effects of noise in Siamese fighting fish (2017-2018) and then particicpated in a short project on contest behviour and noise in European Robins  (2018), both in collaboration with Hansjoerg Kunc and Gareth Arnott. For the following 9 months I participated in a H2020 project modelling the epidemiology of gastrointestinal parasites in farming systems and the effects of vaccines with Eric Morgan and Jacqueline Matthews (2019; PRAGONE). Currently I am happily working as a member of the Integrative Behavioural Biology group at the Instituto Gulbenkina de Ciência, led by Rui Oliveira and participating on the FCT funded Portugal 2020 project ‘SOCIALPEPTIDES’ investigating the role of oxytocin in social behaviour.