Jeff Podos is a Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He conducted his dissertation research under the guidance of Stephen Nowicki and Susan Peters, in the Department of Zoology at Duke University (PhD 1996). He then held a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Arizona, Tucson, in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, where he studied with Daniel Papaj. He also held a post-doctoral position at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Manaus, Brazil. In 2000 he took a position in the Biology Department at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and since 2011 has served as director of the UMass Graduate Program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His research program focuses on topics in animal communication, with particular emphasis on signal performance, development, and learning in songbirds. In addition to work on North American sparrows, he has a long-standing research project on Darwin's finches of the Galapagos Islands, addressing the interface of behavior, ecology, in species divergence. Additional collaborative research projects are addressing topics in Neotropical ornithology and bioacoustics. He has served editorship positions with three other journals: Animal Behaviour, Bird Behavior, and Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, and is currently President-Elect of the Animal Behavior Society.
Susan Healy have several avenues of research currently underway all stemming from an interest in adaptation and cognition. She investigate cognitive ablities in non-model organisms such as hummingbirds, zebra finches and bowerbirds and she is especially interested in 'animal cognition in the wild' and test cognitive abilities of animals (nearly always birds) in as natural conditions as possible. She currently have two major projects: 1) cognitive abilities of rufous hummingbirds (in collaboration with Andy Hurly, U. of Lethbridge, Canada) and 2) the cognitive basis of nest building in birds (in collaboration with Simone Meddle, U. of Edinburgh, UK). She is also interested in explanations for variation in brain size (in collaboration with Candy Rowe, U. of Newcastle, UK)
