Could you please draw the attention of any promising final-year undergraduates or master's students to a PhD opportunity in my research group at Newcastle University? The deadline is 7 January 2022, 5pm GMT. Please distribute to any mailing lists you think are appropriate.
Supervised by me (Tom Smulders), Prof. Phil Stephens (Ecology - Durham University), Dr. Alison Johnston (Statistics - St-Andrews University) and Dr. Stephen McGough (Computing - Newcastle University), the student will build on an existing agent-based model to explore the rules used by food-hoarding birds to decide whether to forage, retrieve or rest, and whether to eat or hoard a given food item. The model aims to be realistic in terms of the information the birds have actual access to (temperature, circadian time, fat reserves, stomach contents, etc). We also plan to use a citizen-science approach to collect data on hoarding intensity across seasons and across a wide geographical range, to provide data against which to test the model's predictions.
We are looking for a student with either a background of evolutionary biology/behavioural ecology/animal behaviour with an interest in modelling, or a computer science student with a strong interest in biological evolution.
The PhD is fully funded for 3.5 years for British applicants. Candidates coming from outside the UK will have to separately apply for the Newcastle University Overseas Research Scholarship (NUORS), which covers the difference in tuition fees between UK applicants and overseas applicants.
All details of the Studentship opportunity, including how to apply, can be found here: https://www.iapetus2.ac.uk/studentships/what-makes-tits-hoard-food-environmental-regulation-of-food-hoarding-in-titmice/