NVG Meeting 2023

Annual NVG meeting 2023 and PhD workshop
Egmond aan Zee

Wednesday 22nd November – Friday 24th November

The 2023 NVG meeting will be held from Wednesday November 22nd to Friday November 24th in conference hotel ‘Zuiderduin‘ in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.

Registrations is now open, please sign up via the following link:

Registration NVG Annual General Meeting, Egmond aan Zee, 22 Nov. – 24 Nov. 2023 (formdesk.com)

!Please do not forget to write your email address and your name at the payment stage, otherwise you do not get a confirmation of registration.

Note that this year we offer Lucie Burgers NVG Conference Scholarship for Master students to support their participation in the meeting:

Are you an MSc student who would like to attend the 2023 NVG conference? Thanks to funds provided by the Lucie Burgers Stichting, we can award 10 MSc students with a scholarship of 200 euros to help cover conference fees. To be eligible, you must:

  • Be an MSc student
  • Present either a talk or poster
  • Have the approval of your supervisor to attend and present
  • Confirm that your research group/institute has no other funds available to help pay for your conference fees

To apply, register for the conference and upload your abstract and tick the box confirming that you are eligible to apply for the funds.

Deadline for applications: 01-11-2023. Results will be announced by 04-11-2023.

And there is more good news! Stichting formation aims to support woman at the start of their scientific careers (MSc, PhD or postdoc abroad) and offers travel grants to subsidize conference attendance or scientific exchanges to the Netherlands. They have an upcoming application deadline on October 2nd. Please visit their website for more information on how to apply.

The meeting starts on Wednesday evening, after the PhD workshop and will go untill Friday afternoon. Highlights of this meeting are the keynote lectures, including the Brill Baerends Lecture and the Dobberke lecture for which internationally renowned behavioural biologists are invited. This year the Dobberke Lecture (Wednesday evening) will be presented by Prof. Melanie Dammhahn. On Thursday, the Brill Baerends Lecture will be presented by Prof. Eva Ringler. More information on the keynote speakers and lectures will follow soon. 

There is ample space for everyone to present, we always try to fit most of the talks into our program.

Eva Ringler (University of Bern, Switzerland)

What amphibians can teach us about the evolution of parental care

Eva Ringler completed her doctorate on the mating system of a poison frog Allobates femoralis at the University of Vienna (Austria) in 2011. Thereafter she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and the University of California Los Angeles (US). Eva Ringler worked on a variety of topics within the field of Behavioural Biology and Ecology, including parental care, animal personalities, developmental plasticity, life-history decisions and olfaction/communication, typically using amphibians (or lizards) as a model species. In 2020, Eva became Assistant Professor and Head of the Division of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Bern (Switzerland, successor of Michael Taborsky), where she in addition and together with her research team started to work on cognition and adaptive decision making in social contexts as part of two SNSF funded projects.

Melanie Dammhahn (University of Münster, Germany)

My niche: evolution and ecology of individual behavioural difference

Melanie Dammhahn is a behavioural ecologist and since 2022 Professor for Behavioural Biology at the University of Münster. After obtaining her PhD on variation in social systems of mouse lemurs, Malagasy primates, in Göttingen (Germany), she studied behaviour and ecology of various mammals in Madagascar, Canada and Germany. Her research interests are at the interface between behaviour, ecology and evolution. Specifically, she studies patterns and determinants of among-individual (co)variation in behaviour, physiology and life-history and their consequences for ecological interactions within and between species. Some projects also aim to illuminate drivers and limits of behavioural responses to human-induced rapid environmental change at key eco-evolutionary levels of variation (individual, population, community).