The NOMIS Foundation has partnered with STRI to support outstanding biologists to join cohorts of three-year postdoctoral fellows in animal behavior, based in the Republic of Panama. NOMIS-STRI postdoctoral fellows explore fundamental questions addressing social behavior and its proximate and ultimate causes, including the evolution and maintenance of social behavior, sensory biology and neuroethology, cognitive ecology, socioecology, neurogenetics, and the genetic or physiological bases of social behavior. The program supports exceptional early-career scholars in a collaborative setting designed to promote the interdisciplinary, synthetic study of animal behavior. See the application guidelines to learn more and apply.
Current NOMIS-STRI Postdoctoral Fellows:
Betzi Pérez-Ortega
How does ecological predictability shape the social structure of bottlenose dolphin populations, and how do these structures support strategic social behaviors and communication?
Betzi’s postdoctoral research focuses on dolphin populations living in ecologically contrasting habitats along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Panama. To achieve a comprehensive, multidimensional understanding of these dolphin societies, Betzi is integrating various methodological approaches, including photo-identification to track individuals, remote biopsy sampling and passive acoustic monitoring. Betzi is a Panamanian marine biologist specializing in behavioral ecology and the conservation of marine mammals. She earned her BS in biology from the University of Panama and her Masters in marine sciences and limnology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she contributed new insights into the reproductive behavior of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) that congregate around the Baja California Sur peninsula, Mexico. Driven by a strong commitment to advancing scientific knowledge in her home country, Betzi returned to Panama for her doctoral dissertation research, investigating the impact of noise on the acoustic communication of bottlenose dolphins along the Caribbean coast of Panama. She earned her PhD at McGill University in Canada, collaborating closely with the ONDAS Lab at the University of Vermont, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the nonprofit marine conservation foundation MarViva, and Panama’s Ministry of Environment. Pérez-Ortega has worked with these entities to collaboratively establish a network of hydrophones to monitor the soundscape in four protected areas along Panama’s Pacific coast.
Laura Segura Hernández
How do abiotic and biotic environmental factors affect sociality?
Laura’s postdoctoral research focuses on a social pseudoscorpion species, which has been documented to have complex social behaviors – including cooperative foraging and group dispersal. Combining observations and manipulations in both the field and the laboratory, her research will provide key baseline information on the sociality of an understudied taxon as well as provide an integrative understanding of how environment can shape sociality. Laura is originally from Costa Rica, where she earned her BS and Licenciatura degrees at the University of Costa Rica. During that time, she worked on projects related to natural history, sexual selection, behavior and biogeography of arachnids. She completed her PhD at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the US, studying behavior and ecophysiology of pseudoscorpions. Beyond her research, Segura Hernández has developed outreach activities for children and the general public and has served as a coordinator, instructor and invited speaker for multiple courses.
Ummat Somjee
How do social contests and conflict resolution shape morphological innovation and signal diversity?
Animals from diverse clades perform stereotypic behaviors in the form of a social contest rituals. These rituals comprise of a series of gestures and responses that result in complex forms of communication. Yet, social rituals are also drivers of morphological elaboration and complexity. Ummat aims to investigate the relationship between social contest behaviors and signal diversity in jousting weevils and the hyper-diverse group of tusked weevils using micro-CT imaging, phylogenetic analysis, state-based modeling and field-centered behavioral experiments. Social signals have been a pervasive feature shaping the evolution of animal diversity, but signal evolution is complex and remains challenging to predict. Ummat’s research aims to deepen our understanding of how social interactions shape the elaboration and diversification of social signals. Originally from Kenya, Ummat completed his BSc at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He completed both a Masters and a PhD at the University of Florida, US. His research has been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and on NPR and a PBS documentary “Bugs That Rule the World.”
Jenna Kohles
The role of bat sociality in reducing environmental uncertainty
Uncertainty permeates the lives of both human and nonhuman animals and has pervasive influence on how animals behave. Do social connections help animals deal with the stress of uncertainty? Using biologging technology, quantification of prey landscapes, and biomarkers for energetic stress, Jenna is exploring how sociality mitigates uncertainty in animal societies. During her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, she investigated how resource distribution and the social environment influence foraging behavior for insectivorous bats in Panama and for fruit bats on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. For her postdoctoral fellowship, she is using a long-term study system of two neotropical bat species specialized on ephemeral prey, in which both prey distribution and social structure can be quantified and experimentally manipulated, to test whether social stability increases with increasing environmental uncertainty in wild animal populations.
Ricardo Cossio
Linking parental care and spatial cognition: a neurobiology approach
Ricardo Cossio is interested in understanding how variations in life history influence the evolution of cognitive abilities, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes. During his PhD at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Germany, he investigated how ecological factors shape individual behavioral differences. Currently, his research employs integrative techniques to establish causal links between social behaviors and memory-based decision-making in animals as they navigate complex environments.
Judith Smit
Flexible vibes: the proximate and ultimate causes of behavioral plasticity in vibrationally duetting insects
Why do animals do what they do? And how do they manage to effectively communicate across different environments? These are questions that fascinate Judith and drive her research. Using field observations, behavioral experiments, and quantitative genetics, she explores how environmental conditions impact the evolution of sexual communication systems. During her PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, she investigated how urbanization affects sexual communication in túngara frogs, conducting her fieldwork at STRI in Panama. During her postdoctoral fellowship, Judith is investigating the role of behavioral plasticity in vibrational duetting in treehoppers.
