Annual NVG meeting 2022 and PhD workshop
Egmond aan Zee
Wednesday 23rd November – Friday 25th November
Click here to see a preliminary programme
Click here to see the abstract book
Registration is now closed. We’re looking forward to welcoming you all to Egmond-aan-Zee in a few weeks!
The 2022 NVG meeting will be held from Wednesday November 23th to Friday November 25th in conference hotel ‘Zuiderduin‘ in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
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 Dr. Angela Stöger-Horwath. On Thursday, the Brill Baerends Lecture will be presented by Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal. More information on the keynote speakers and lectures can be found below.
There is ample space for everyone to present, we always try to fit most of the talks into our program.
The Brill Baerends Lecture by Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal
Title of the lecture: Evolution of Emotions and Empathy in the Primates
Frans B. M. de Waal is a Dutch/American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of primates. His first book, Chimpanzee Politics (1982), compared the schmoozing and scheming of chimpanzees involved in power struggles with that of human politicians. His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and outlets specialized in animal behavior. His popular books – translated into 20+ languages – have made him one of the world’s most visible primatologists. His latest books are Mama’s Last Hug (Norton, 2019) and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist (Norton, 2022). De Waal is C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. He has been elected to the (US) National Academy of Sciences as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Time declared him one of The Worlds’ 100 Most Influential People Today.
Dobberke lecture by Dr. Angela Stöger-Horwath
Title of the lecture: Vocal creativity in elephants
Angela Stöger completed her doctorate in 2006, and she has worked as a scientist at the Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna since 2009, where she founded the Mammal Communication Lab in 2011. Angela Stöger researches the communication of mammals; currently, she is focusing on African and Asian elephants. Moreover, her research team also studies the communication of cheetahs, lions, giraffes, bears and African wild dogs. In 2021, Angela Stöger was among the top 3 in the election of Austria’s Scientist of the Year. She is the author of the book “Von singenden Mäusen und quietschenden Elefanten” (Of singing mice and squeaking elephants), which was awarded Austria’s Science Book of the Year in 2022.
Keynote lecture by Dr. Sanne Moorman
Title of the lecture: Mechanisms for vocal sequence perception and production – a zebra finch perspective
Sanne Moorman obtained her PhD cum laude at Utrecht University in 2015. Her subsequent postdoctoral research was at Boston University, Tufts University (Boston, MA, USA), and Utrecht University, funded with Rubicon and Veni fellowships (NWO). She recently started her tenure track at the University of Groningen as Assistant Professor in Behavioural Neuroscience. Her research focusses on the neural mechanisms of auditory-vocal learning and memory in songbirds, as a model for human speech acquisition.
Keynote lecture by Prof. Isabel Beets
Title of the lecture: Decoding ancient neuropeptidergic modulation of learning and memory in C. elegans
Prof. Isabel Beets studies the mechanisms by which neuropeptides regulate experience-dependent brain plasticity, such as learning and memory. In 2018, she started her own research group at the Biology Department of KU Leuven (Belgium) and was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2020 for investigating the experience-dependent organization of neuropeptide-receptor signaling networks at a system-wide level. Her research group mainly uses the genetic model organism C. elegans to uncover how neuropeptide signaling networks operate at a brain-wide scale to adapt behavior in response to aversive (negative) experiences.
Keynote lecture by Dr. Sjouke Kingma
Title of the lecture: Conflict and cooperation in birds: what happens when competitors need each other?
As a behavioural ecologist, Sjouke Kingma aims to understand the mechanistic, ecological and evolutionary processes underlying how animals adapt to the environment they live in. His research focusses on, but is not limited to, the causes and consequences of social behaviours, in particular group living, cooperation and altruism, because we still do not really understand how and under what circumstances such behaviours can evolve and how animals overcome the fundamental evolutionary and behavioural conflicts that necessarily arise when individuals have to share resources. Sjouke Kingma’s research aims at understanding this fundamental puzzle, by combining detailed field observations, physiological measures, molecular analyses and experiments in a range of avian study systems with large-scale conceptual and comparative work.