Charlotte K. Hemelrijk

Charlotte K. Hemelrijk is full professor of the self-organisation of social systems at the University Groningen in the Netherlands. Her main topics of study, at present, are the collective escape in bird flocks and dominance relations between the sexes in all kinds of animals.

Her studies of collective escape involve systematically driving away flocks of birds with a RobotFalcon and filming their escape from both, the perspective of the RobotFalcon, and from that of an observer on the ground. Results are used for clearing agrarian fields of birds, and aimed at use for clearing airports.

For studying the dynamics of intersexual dominance, she develops bottom-up computational models and tests them in real animals,  with a focus on primates and rodents