During a Psychology degree I became interested in Artificial Intelligence, specifically the prospect of capturing aspects of biological intelligence by mimicking insects. This led to a PhD at Sussex with Prof Tom Collett, where we have studied spatial cognition in ants. Following my DPhil I completed BBSRC, Leverhulme and RCUK postdocs before becoming a Reader in 2012 and subsequently a Professor of Neuroethology.

My research is interested in how neural and sensory mechanisms are tuned to an animal's environment to produce adaptive behaviour. I hope to be able to learn principles that will enable us to design biomimetic robots that will capture some of the performance of natural systems in tasks like navigation.