Alba Motes Rodrigo
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albamotesr.bsky.social
Alba Motes Rodrigo
@albamotesr.bsky.social
Behavioral scientist investigating what it means to be social | I work with 🐒 and 🐜 | Passionate about medical applications of ethology | UNIL🇨🇭
Reposted by Alba Motes Rodrigo
Just 1 week to apply! 4 year @erc.europa.eu funded PhD position working in an interdisciplinary team to study #culturalEvolution as a process of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions. Details 👉 hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... 🙏Please share!
November 5, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Grant and paper rejections on the same day should not be allowed… 🥲 but happy to back in the snowy mountains after a lovely field visit 🏔️
October 29, 2025 at 3:30 PM
So great to catch up with Stef and the UVP mo keys on our way back home ♥️ thanks for having us ♥️
One last monkey morning before we fly out. Very lucky to be able to join the @urbanvervetproject.bsky.social team to visit 2 of their groups today!
October 28, 2025 at 11:00 AM
On day 3 at the Inkawu vervet project our fantastic master students did some more field experiments for @rachelaharrison.bsky.social ‘s project on social tolerance which has been now going on for over 2 years!
October 27, 2025 at 6:53 AM
Day 2 at the Inkawu Vervet Project was full of giraffes 🦒 and vervets munching on greens 🥬
October 24, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Great first day in the field at IVP with Rachel and our wonderful master students from @dee-unil.bsky.social and @durham.ac.uk
October 23, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Delphine’s awesome framework is out! So looking forwards to add real world data to this awesome theory ♥️congratulations my friend ♥️
Social relationships are powerful predictors of fitness across social animals. But *why*?

In our new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper, we outline testable predictions for why relationship quality and quantity adaptively vary across socio-ecological contexts.

tinyurl.com/55dnkeh7
October 16, 2025 at 7:21 AM
Reposted by Alba Motes Rodrigo
🐦 Exciting news! Our new paper is out in PLOS Biology:
“A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.”
Led by the #ManyBirds Project - 129 researchers, 82 institutions, 24 countries 🌍
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
@themanybirds.bsky.social
A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia
Neophobia (the aversive response to novelty) varies considerably across species and individuals, and can impact adaptability and survival. This study assesses neophobia in 1400 subjects from 136 bird ...
journals.plos.org
October 14, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Alba Motes Rodrigo
🦅PhD position 🦅 in my new group at @fbm-unil.bsky.social in Switzerland, studying how the social and resource landscapes shape the learning process for soaring flight. Deadline: Oct 30. Pls repost! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...
October 6, 2025 at 5:56 AM
@thecharleywu.bsky.social is an amazing scientist and human being. If you want to do a phd in computational cognition/culture, this is a golden opportunity 👇🏼
🚀Join our team @tuda.bsky.social ! 🚀
I'm looking for 3 PhDs & 1 Postdoc for my @erc.europa.eu project “C4: Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture” to study learning across individuals, teams, and cultural timescales
👉 PhD: hmc-lab.com/ERC_PhDs.html
👉 Postdoc: hmc-lab.com/ERC_Postdoc....
June 11, 2025 at 8:41 AM
New paper out led by Damien Neadle proposing a protocol for standardized implementation and reporting of reliability analysis.
Many fields use video coding + interrater reliability. But: how reliable are those reliability tests?

No standards exist for sample size, clip choice, or metrics - a blind spot.

We present BRAVO—a first workflow to improve reliability by restricting coders DOF.

[Paper is OA]

#Reproducibility
April 23, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Alba Motes Rodrigo
Applications now open for UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evo Bio (1–6 Sept 2025, Lausanne)!
Aimed at PhD students interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology questions like sexual selection, social & life-history evolution. Scholarships available.
Pls share! www.shorturl.at/znk5g
April 17, 2025 at 3:21 PM
🥳🥳
We have announced the 2024 Robert May Prize shortlist, our award for early career researchers! 🏆

Follow the link below to see our shortlisted authors and their papers 🌎 🧪 👇
buff.ly
March 21, 2025 at 8:42 PM
If you are wondering whether given the chance chimps recreate the famous bone-throwing scene from 2001 Space Odyssey, have a look at this paper we published a couple of years ago.
March 5, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Alba Motes Rodrigo
New year, new paper! We continue to unpick the interplay between ecological upheaval and sociality and show altered social structure could result in 2x disease transmission rates. Senior authored by the unstoppable @ctestard.bsky.social. In Ecology Letters: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
A Natural Disaster Exacerbates and Redistributes Disease Risk Among Free‐Ranging Macaques by Altering Social Structure
By simulating disease spread in free-living rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) before and after a hurricane, we demonstrate doubled pathogen transmission rates up to 5 years following the disaster, equ...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
January 6, 2025 at 2:10 PM
I think it is absolutely wonderful that my first post here celebrates the fantastic work of @delphinedemoor.bsky.social. What a mammoth of a data base 😍 congratulations 🐬
February 18, 2025 at 8:33 PM