I spent five years working on Brains on Board, a big collaborative project that aimed to “reverse engineer the honeybee brain”.

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Brains on Board has now finished, but some of my colleagues created Opteran, an exciting commercial spin-out, turning our insights into bee brains into useful, useable technology.

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For eight years, I worked in the fertile environment  of Professor Lars Chittka’s group at Queen Mary University of London, the world's foremost center of research into bee behaviour and cognition. Lars’s new book, The Mind of a Bee, explores the remarkable abilities of insect minds.

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I did my field work on bee behaviour at Rothamsted Research, the world’s oldest agricultural research institution and home of the “classical” experiments, which have been running for 180 years and counting!

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Before moving to QMUL, I was lucky enough to work with Professor Tom Collett at the University of Sussex. Tom is arguably the most important pioneer in the study of insect navigation.

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Several of my colleagues from Sussex, such as Professor Andy Philippides, who uses maths and computing approaches to understand insect behaviour, and Professor Paul Graham, who approaches similar questions from the side of psychology and neuroscience, remain important collaborators today. Paul is the driving force behind the excellent Insect and Robot Navigation blog, which rounds up and reports on scientific advances in the interconnected worlds of insect navigation and cutting-edge robotics.

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My PhD work was supervised by Professor Kate Buchanan, then at Cardiff University, now a professor at Deakin University; and Professor Andy Bennett, then at the University of Bristol, now at Deakin.

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My friend Rebecca Nesbit had an interesting research career, studying butterflies and bees, and is now a popular science writer. Her latest book, Tickets to the Ark, is a fascinating and thoughtful exploration of how we should prioritise our conservation efforts in a rapidly changing climate.

 

Apart from science, I’m also passionately interested in art and photography. My brother, Luke Woodgate, is the real artist in the family. His fine art prints have been featured several times in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and are available from his website.

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Also, check out National Funk, one of Luke’s many music projects, here. They’re annoyingly good!

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My sister, Zanna Woodgate, is a landscape architect with an unusual background in theatrical lighting design, which informs her unique landscape designs.