CENTER FOR INTEGRATIVE ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
Columbia University in the City of New York
Director
Dustin Rubenstein, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
Dustin Rubenstein studies why complex animal societies form and how organisms cope with environmental change. His laboratory combines studies of behavior, ecology, and evolution with those of the underlying molecular and neuroendorine mechanisms.
Executive Committee
Frances Champagne, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Frances Champagne examines developmental plasticity in response to environmental experiences. She is interested in the neural mechanisms and the epigenetic changes that allow these environmental effects to persist within and across generations.
James Curley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
James Curley studies the neurobiology and development of social behavior. His current work examines how social dominance hierarchies and individual variation in social network position is associated with variation in brain gene expression.
Darcy Kelley, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Darcy Kelley’s uses the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis , to study the neurobiology of social communication, with the goal of determining how one brain communicates with another and to study sexual differentiation.
Sarah Woolley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Sarah Woolley studies the neural basis and behavior of social communication. Her laboratory focuses on how the encoding of songs by neurons and circuits in the songbird brain is related to perception and behavior.
Affiliated Faculty
Natalie Boelman, Ph.D.
Adjunct Associate Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Natalie Boelman studies how the composition, physical structure, and phenology of Arctic-Boreal vegetation are changing, how these changes impact resident and migratory animals, and the role animals in turn play in mediating change in the region.
Marina Cords, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
Marina Cords studies studies social evolution and the ecology of social variation in non-human primates. Her work is based on the decades-long study of a wild population of forest-dwelling monkeys in Kenya.
Szabolcs Marka, Ph.D.
Professor
Departments of Physics and Astronomy
Szabolcs Marka is an experimental physicist who also develops instrumentation for behavioral studies.
Zsuzsanna Marka, Ph.D.
Associate Research Scientist
Departments of Physics and Astronomy
Zsuzsanna Marka develops instrumentation for behavioral studies.
Itsik Pe’er, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Itsik Pe’er studies how to measure, describe and quantify differences between individual DNA sequences. His lab examines how sequence variation affects biological processes and influences human disease.
Joe Pickrell, Ph.D.
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Biological Sciences (and New York Genome Center)
Joe Pickrell develops novel statistical approaches to transform large-scale genomic data into improved understanding of human biology and history. His laboratory helps determine the evolutionary and molecular mechanisms that lead to phenotypic differences.
Russell Romeo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology (Barnard College)
Russell Romeo examines the effects of pubertal maturation on brain and behavior. His laboratory studies in the impact of stress on the development of neural circuits important in emotional reactivity.
Nathaniel Sawtell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Neuroscience (CUMC)
Nathaniel Sawtell studies the functions of cerebellum-like sensory structures and the cerebellum in fish and mammals. His lab is also interested in understanding the neural mechanisms through which past experiences affect early stages of sensory processing.
Rae Silver, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Psychology
Rae Silver studies studies neuro-immune system interactions and the brain clock located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Kathy Takayama, Ph.D.
Associate Provost and Executive Director
Department of Biological Sciences and Center for Teaching and Learning
Kathy Takayama runs Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning and is involved in STEM education training across the University for both students and faculty.
Jonathan Weiner
Professor
Columbia School of Journalism
Jonathan Weiner writes popular books about biology. He also teaches science writing at Columbia Journalism School.
Rafael Yuste, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Rafael Yuste is interested in understandign how neural circuits work to generate behavior and internal brain states. His laboratory studies the cerebral cortex of mice and the nerve cell of Hydra.
Tien Zheng, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Statistics
Tien Zheng develops novel methods for exploring and analyzing interesting patterns in complex data from different application domains. Her current projects are in the fields of statistical genetics, bioinformatics and computational biology.