Team
Hannah ter Hofstede, Assistant Professor
I have always been fascinated by animals and their behaviour. My research investigates how animal sensory systems filter the information they obtain about their environment and how sensory systems coevolve with behaviour. I started at the University of Windsor in January 2023. I am faculty in the Department of integrative Biology and the Chair of the Behaviour, Cognition and Neuroscience program. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society Graduate Program at Dartmouth College, NH, USA, where I was a faculty member from 2013-2022. My postdoctoral positions were both in the UK, one at the University of Bristol and the other at Cambridge University. I completed my PhD in the lab of James Fullard at the University of Toronto Mississauga and my MSc in the lab of Brock Fenton at York University.

Graduate Students
Ciara Kernan, PhD candidate (Dartmouth College, NH, USA)
I am interested in sensory ecology, animal communication, and understanding the tradeoffs that signalers face between finding mates and avoiding predation - especially when signals are produced in multiple modalities (e.g., airborne sound and substrate-borne vibrations in Neotropical katydids).

Mia Phillips, PhD candidate (Dartmouth College, NH, USA)
I'm broadly interested in sensory ecology and understanding how animals obtain information from their surroundings. Specifically, I'm interested in the evolution and physiology of acoustic communication systems in crickets. Crickets, like many animals, rely on acoustic signals to find mates and reproduce. From these signals, listening crickets can gain information about the species, quality, and location of the sender. At Dartmouth, I'm investigating a cricket genus that uses both vibrational and acoustic communication within its courtship duet. I want to know how this unusual duet evolved and the underlying mechanisms that make it happen. I'm also generally interested in studying the influence of novel anthropogenic pressures on acoustic communication systems.

Miranda Zammarelli, PhD student (Dartmouth College, NH, USA)
Generally, I am interested in ornithology, bioacoustics, population ecology, and spatial ecology. My research focuses on understanding how territory size and quality influences songbirds’ nest success as well as how often they sing. I conduct my research at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, USA.
Hadia Nadeem, MSc student (University of Windsor)
My research interests revolve around the captivating interplay between predator-prey interactions and neurobiology. I am driven to delve into the intricate neural mechanisms that underlie prey species' responses to varying predator threats. My curiosity lies in understanding how sensory systems translate predator cues into adaptive behaviors through my work, I aspire to contribute to the understanding of how neurobiology shapes prey survival strategies within complex ecological contexts.
Undergraduate Students
Tamjeed Nawaz, IGNITE student (University of Windsor)
Tamjeed is measuring responses in katydid auditory neurons to acoustic stimuli, such as bat echolocation calls, to better understand the relationship between hearing and antipredator behaviour.

Rana Elkafarneh, IGNITE student (University of Windsor)
Rana is documenting the types of acoustic signals big brown bats make during social interactions to provide behavioural context to signals recorded during passive acoustic monitoring of bats.

Liam O'Leary, IGNITE student (University of Windsor)
Liam is creating a database of animal sounds from Windsor and Essex County to improve local passive acoustic monitoring efforts by broadening the number of species that can be identified in recordings.