Want to know more about monkeys kidnapping other monkeys?🐒 I had an amazing chat together with @bjjbarrett.bsky.social on @sidedoorpod.bsky.social about the Coiban capuchins and their wild antics. Science really is stranger than fiction! Listen 👂 here: www.si.edu/sidedoor/mon...

I'm looking for a doctoral student with Bayesian background to work on Bayesian workflow and cross-validation (see my publication list users.aalto.fi/~ave/publica... for my recent work) at Aalto University. Apply through the ELLIS PhD program (dl October 31) ellis.eu/news/ellis-p...

⭐PhD position available!⭐ Come join us @imprs-qbee.bsky.social to study communication and collective behavior in animal groups! We're looking for someone excited to use computational approaches to tackle biological questions, using our full-group tracking datasets imprs-qbee.mpg.de/121465/analy...

Are you studying animal sociality? My (now published) first PhD chapter proposes a Bayesian + causal framework to infer the factors shaping the social relationships that animals form with one another. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

3yr PDRA at @exeter.ac.uk with @york.ac.uk and Centre for Whale Research, studying how killer whale social relationships change with prey availability, partner loss and social info. A fantastic team & unique longterm dataset. Deadline 19 Oct! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOT336/postdoctoral-research-associate

It's hiring season at @iast.fr! - 2y research postdoc contract - Full autonomy, you are your own PI - Awesome multidisciplinary environment - All social and behavioral sciences welcome - Seed funding for projects and workshops - Gorgeous city in the south of France www.iast.fr/research-fel...

When thinking about causal inference, mechanistic or process models are important. I think that the association of “causal” with black-box models leads to lots of problems. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/19/w...

'The Desperation of Causal Inference in Ecology' "What’s the solution? If you ask me, be less gaga over any statistical method and teach everyone basic biological models, simulate data from it and then fit their statistical model to it." […]

Are you studying animal sociality? Confused about the "non-independence" of social network data: what on earth are they? are they threatening your results? should you attempt to get rid of them? A thread summarising a part of our new paper (ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...).

I’m especially proud of this article I wrote about Gaussian Processes for the Recast blog! 🥳 GPs are super interesting, but it’s not easy to wrap your head around them at first 🤔 This is a medium level (more intuition than math) introduction to GPs for time series. getrecast.com/gaussian-pro...

"Being Bayesian in a Frequentist World" New post on "Bayesian dynamic borrowing" in R 📚 Link 👇

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

New paper from my group led by Odd Jacobson, former PhD student & current postdoc @livingingroups.bsky.social : How do animal groups simultaneously balance between- and within-group competition in dynamic environments and does this impact movement and space use? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It’s publication day for this wonderful anthology on cinema in which I have a contribution on time and memory, life and death, and the poet’s journey in Eternity and a Day (1998) and other films by Theo Angelopoulos. “Come. We are going to the island.”

Fantastic work. Great case for using generative network models.

🐒🕸️ New preprint! Confused about how to model animal social networks? ASNA can be confusing—but also full of opportunity. We break down 5 common misunderstandings in animal social network analysis and share solutions from behavioural ecology, anthro, stats, & network science. Hope it helps! A 🧵

⭐🎓The Department of Sociology in Vienna @univie.ac.at‬ invites applications for a Tenure Track Professor in Sociology with focus on Quantitative Social Science Research Methods | #Sociology | quant methods Apply here (17 Sept 25): jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Tenure-T...

Call for Applications: Wiko Early Career Call for #fellowships 2026/27 in the #NaturalSciences and #LifeSciences. Apply online by November 1st for a 3–5 month fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin – Institute for Advanced Study: wiko-berlin.de/fellow-werde... #cfa

🚨 Lecturer in Animal Ecology position @jcuofficial.bsky.social. Candidates with expertise in terrestrial animal ecology are encouraged. 📍 Townsville, AU Closes: 8th Aug 2025 🔗 careers.jcu.edu.au/jobs/lecture...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

New #rstats blog up! solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07... This is the first in a brief series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code. Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social and @stephenjwild.bsky.social for their helpful reviews.

How do we build theory in cogsci? traditional physics w its rich data and experimental possibilities is often used as parangon. We argue historical sciences provide an equally rich source: "Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect": doi.org/10.1007/s421... 🧵 1/

New paper with Aida Gómez-Robles: “Why did the human brain size evolve: a way forward”. We propose that this seemingly unanswerable question can be tackled with simulation-based inference. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

New paper from the lab: how do we make probabilistic species interaction networks more useful and robust? @francisbanville.bsky.social has some thoughts, and went through the literature to map mathematical definitions to ecological concepts. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 🧪

Excited to announce I'll be giving a workshop on creating Bayesian models of social transmission at @royalholloway.bsky.social Centre for Decision Sciences Summer School taking place from Sept 8-12th (center-decision-sciences.com/cds-summer-s...)

I would love to host a PhD student on my lab with strong quantitative training interested in projects integrating ecology and evolution, or cell physiology and ecological dynamics www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

Please share widely! We are offering the 4th iteration of our free & online crash course in Evolutionary Biology, catered to students in the Global South! Join us this summer for an incredible line of up classes & tutorials from amazing graduate student researchers, covering a vast array of topics!

👇 New #preprint combining computational models with zebbie data: "Dynamic strategic social learning in nest-building zebra finches and its generalisability". 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧵1/n

there has been a bunch of (many good) papers coming about about integrating Causal Inference and DAGS into research about behavior and ecology (i.e. doi.org/10.1111/brv....) but i thought it might be useful to show some example empirical papers that do so (see growing thread)...

Very excited to see our paper using historical data to infer toothed whale lifespans published this week in the Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society (@biojlinnsoc.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1093/biol... w. @darrencroft.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social @mialybkaer.bsky.social, Dan Franks

Registrations are open for the Evolutionary Biology Crash Course 2025! This is our fourth year of organizing this open-access course for anyone who is interested in evolution! 🧬

Amen - coefficients from different (often non-linear) models don't mean the same thing, but they get compared all the time. The "effect" of interest is a marginal effect for an explicit target population, not a parameter. Software guided workflow could help, plug into tools like marginaleffects.com

Humans have many unusual traditions. But did you know animals’ strange behaviors can become culture too? Out now in Current Biology (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) we show the rise and spread of a surprising tradition: interspecies infant abduction. Interactive timeline (www.ab.mpg.de/671374) 🧵 (1/12)

Postdoc job alert! I'm hiring a 3-yr postdoc to work on our Social Modifiers of Primate Lifespans grant. Job info and how to apply below. Deadline June 1. Pls share! jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

Applications now open for UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evo Bio (1–6 Sept 2025, Lausanne)! Aimed at PhD students interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology questions like sexual selection, social & life-history evolution. Scholarships available. Pls share! www.shorturl.at/znk5g

I have learned that some people have still not heard the Good News about Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. My gentle animated interactive explanation: elevanth.org/blog/2017/11...

Honestly I think this is the most depressing aspect of the current state of science for me. The sheer effort and money that is being wasted on data collection when the study is transparently dead on arrival.>

I've been guest editing a focus issue for Journal of Physics: Complexity with @jgyou.bsky.social, @gcant.bsky.social, and Cate De Bacco on Statistical Inference and Machine Learning for Complex Networks. See iopscience.iop.org/collections/..., and feel free to get in touch with any questions!

I'm happy to announce a Ph.D. position open working with Letty Koopman & me at the SNA cluster in Groningen! Application deadline is March 31st. The project will develop multiplex network models that estimate & adjust for measure biases related to friendship. Please share! www.rug.nl/about-ug/wor...

I spoke with @cathleenogrady.bsky.social for this story on the many analysts paper in ecology. To me the concerning thing is the interpretation, not the (expected) finding. www.science.org/content/arti...

Say you’ve got very good causal IDENTIFICATION. Can you say you have causality, can make a causal general claim, and can say what “THE causal effect” is? NO We explain why in new article at Journal of Causal Inference. www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

Such a happy coincidence to have both pieces out at the same time! 💛

🌿 Join the @mbchimp.bsky.social ! 🐵 Seeking a part-time Data Assistant in Göttingen, Germany. Ideal candidates have experience in GIS and R, and will work with camera trap and spatial data. Dive into chimpanzee behavioral ecology in Guinea's PNMB. #Conservation #DataScience

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩 Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365... Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

New blog post! I show how to marginalise discrete variables from Bayesian ecological models in Stan and how to recover their posterior distributions after estimation. I cover occupancy and N-mixture models using multiple parameterisations and model types. quantecol.com.au/blog/margina...

🏰 PhD position on computational modelling | collective dynamics | cultural evolution 🏰 Get in touch with any questions you might have and join me in beautiful Marburg! stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/c... (Deutsch) stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/3... (English)

We're organizing a NetSci'25 satellite workshop on Directed Acyclic Graphs — if you're working on, e.g., citation graphs, pedigrees, causality, temporal-network event graphs, network representations of spacetime, or any other areas where DAGs play a role, please contribute! www.dagshop.xyz

🚨 Call for abstracts 🚨 Abstract submission for 17th Ecology & Behaviour annual meeting is now open until March 28th! To submit: ➡️ ecobhvr2025.sciencesconf.org?forward-acti... ➡️ Create an account ➡️ "New submission" ➡️ Fill in the requested information ➡️ Submit