Recipients Dr Stephanie King and Dr Stephen Montgomery were successful a rigorous year-long selection process in a global competition that started with 716 submitted letters of intent involving scientists with their laboratories in more than 50 different countries.
Dr King, who is renowned for her work on dolphin social cognition, will use the funds for her project on the ‘The Social Origins of Rhythm’ with her international collaborators, Andrea Ravignani of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands, Peter Madsen of Aarhus University, Denmark and Peter Cook of New College Florida, USA. Together, they will use data from more 30 than marine mammal species and integrate approaches from field biology, comparative neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and speech sciences to test competing hypotheses on the evolutionary roots of the social use of vocal rhythm.
Dr Montgomery will continue his exciting work with Heliconiini butterflies to understand how brains evolve. These butterflies have been studied for 150 years, but only recently has the extent of variation in brain morphology been revealed, with some brain regions varying in size by over 25 times. Together with his international colleagues, Drs Caroline Bacquet of IKIAM, Ecuador, Basil el Jundi of NTNU Trondheim, Norway and Arnaud Martin of George Washington University, USA, this project will help the team develop tools and protocols to visualise, manipulate and understand neural variation, its developmental origins and behavioural consequence.