We welcome Morgane Nouvian to the Zukunftskolleg
Morgane Nouvian is one of three new Research Fellows from the 13th call for applications. She has started her fellowship in April and is affiliated with the Department of Biology.
Morgane did a joint PhD at the University of Queensland (Australia) and the University Paul Sabatier (France), where she worked on the olfactory modulation of aggression in bees. After completing her PhD and starting her 2-year fellowship from the Fyssen Foundation in Konstanz, she changed her subject and worked on learning – still in bees.
“The research project I will do at the ZuKo focuses back on the defensive behaviour of honeybees, but this time approaching it as a collective behaviour. I would like to understand how the bees coordinate so that an appropriate number of defenders respond, and how each individual bee takes the decision to attack or not depending on the social information it receives," Morgane explains. Her research project has two parts: a behavioural one in which she wants to understand which information are important for the bee, and a neurobiological one in which she will study how this information is integrated by the bee brain.
In her free time, Morgane plays volleyball and goes hiking, skiing as well as diving. “Since I started my PhD I’ve become fascinated by bees in general, and I love to spy on the mason bees nesting on my balcony," she says.