I obtained a BSc from the University of Toronto, a MEd from Harvard University, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. After postdoctoral work at the University of Sussex and the University of Western Ontario (now Western University of Canada), I became a University Research Fellow at the University of Toronto.

In 1995, I started my position at Macquarie University, where I am currently Professor in the School of Natural Sciences. As of 2026, I am retired.

My research crosses mechanistic, functional and evolutionary questions in the study of animal behaviour. A central theme of my research concerns how animals process information. Dealing with information is crucial for many important behaviours in an animal's life, including choosing a mate, avoiding predators, and finding food. The range of species I have studied include humans, rats, pigeons, chickadees, Clark's nutcrackers, desert ants, and honeybees. A large part of my research has concentrated on how animals deal with space and time.

My research bridges comparative cognition and neuroethology. In 2023, I received the career Research Award from the Comparative Cognition Society.

In our latest ARC Discovery Project (DP200102337), we examined learning processes in the early outdoor life of red honey ants, desert ants in Central Australia. We worked in the Alice Springs area.

We discovered that ants oscillate quasi-constantly in learning about their outdoor world. Their paths turn left and right in meandering, and their heads swing left and right. Ants oscillate more when matters have changed, such as when we experimentally changed their visual surround. These oscillatory behaviours seem to be their way of exploring and learning about the world. We bet that such oscillatory behaviour are common among animals and even beyond animals, making the oscillator a basic unit of navigation and of life.

Ants also stop and scan their environment occasionally. Again, they scan more when conditions have changed. Scanning is another way to learn about the outdoor world, and we characterised the red honey ants' scanning behaviour.

While most of the lab's research is focused on navigation for foraging, this latest project also examined learning and navigation processes when worker ants go dumping, that is, take refuse out of their nest to deposit outside. Ants improve in their travel efficiency in dumping from one trip to the next. They also tend to travel in the same general direction, called a sector, from one dumping trip to the next, a practice that likely eases the task of learning the environment for efficient dumping of potentially harmful waste.

Because of fortuitous circumstances, we also observed and characterised how ants learn their environment in relocating. For workers, relocation is not a one-trip affair, as they need to go back and forth between the new and old nests in transporting valuable resources such as larvae.

We also found that red honey ants are sensitive to magnetic cues of the Earth. When we experimentally manipulated geomagnetic cues just before an ant's very first learning walk, their walks were markedly different from ants encountering control conditions with unaltered geomagnetic cues.

I am slated to teach two advanced writing in the Faculty at the Graduate Diploma level, the classes

FOSE7510 STEM Writing for Researchers

and

FOSE7520 STEM Literature Project.

I will be teaching the classes on a casual basis as in 2026, I am retired.

Teaching philosophy

I adopt a student-centred approach to teaching. In writing classes, the teacher at the front is less a teacher and more a coach. In a sense, the students at a Masters level all know how to write. They know just about all the vocabulary they need, and they know how to put a sentence together. The idea of a writing class is to provide some tips and workshops to get students to write better. That is more like coaching than teaching.

In coaching writing, we have to take a whole-person approach, much like a tennis coach of a talented young player must take a whole-person approach in getting her player to play better. Like tennis, attitudes, physical fitness, proper rest, mindfulness, and a good diet, the 'medicine' preached by lifestyle medicine, all matter. That is because all these facets of lifestyle medicine improve cognitive functioning. And would cognitive functioning matter for writing? The question is rhetorical. A writing coach must in part be a life coach.