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. Marc Naguib is professor in Behavioural Ecology at the Animal Sciences Department of Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He studied biology at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany and received his PhD (1995) at UNC Chapel Hill, NC in the US. After his PhD held positions at the Freie Universitaet Berlin (1995-1999) and Bielefeld University (2000-2007) in Germany, and at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (2008-2011), until he was appointed in 2011 as Chair of the Behavioural Ecology Group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He is specialized in vocal communication, social behaviour, animal personality and the effects of conditions experienced during early development on behaviour and life history traits, mainly using song birds as model. His research group is also involved in animal welfare research using farm animals. He has served for many years on the council of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) and of the Ethologische Gesellschaft. He published > 80 scientific publications and has been Editor for Advances in the Study of Behaviour since 2003. Since 2014 he is Executive Editor. John Mitani is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, U.S.A. He earned his AB from the University of California, Berkeley and PhD (1984) at the University of California, Davis. He conducted postdoctoral research and held faculty positions at the Rockefeller University Field Research Center for Ecology and Ethology (1984-1989) and the University of California, Davis (1989-1990) before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, where he is now the James N. Spuhler Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. Mitani conducts fieldwork on the social behavior and communication of apes and has published papers on all five kinds of living apes in Africa and Asia. His current research, initiated in 1995, involves a field study of an unusually large community of chimpanzees at Ngogo in the Kibale National Park, Uganda. In the past he has served as an Editor of Animal Behaviour and is currently an Associate Editor and on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Primatology, Journal of Human Evolution, and Primates. He has been an Editor for Advances in the Study of Behavior since 2006. Leigh Simmons is an ARC Professorial Fellow and Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia. He studied at the University of Nottingham where he recieved his PhD in 1987. He has held a research fellowship at the University of Liverpool UK before moving to Australia. His research uses both vertebrates and invertebrates to test the predictions and assumptions of theoretical models of sexual selection and life history evolution. Collectively, these research programs seek to determine the direction and strength of selection acting on male and female reproductive strategies, and on the morphological and life history traits that contribute to fitness, from the whole organism to its gametes. He has published more than 280 papers and articles, authored a book on insect sperm competition, and co-edited a volumes on dung beetle ecology and evolution, and insect mating systems. He has had extensive editorial experience with many journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, and is a former Executive Editor of Animal Behaviour. He is currently Editor-in Chief of Behavioral Ecology, and has been an Editor of Advances in the Study of Behavior since 2009. He was elected to the Australian Academy in 2009. University of Minnesota, College of Biological Sciences, USA Sue Healy is a Reader in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, UK. She studied zoology and physiology at the University of Otago, New Zealand before she received her DPhil (1991) at the University of Oxford, UK. She was a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford (St John’s College, 1991-1993) before taking positions at the University of Newcastle (1993-1999), the University of Edinburgh (1999-2008) and the University of St Andrews (2009- ). She works on the role of adaptation on animal cognition, with especial interests in testing abilities of animals under field conditions and determining relationships between behaviour and the brain. She has worked on food-storing behavior and the hippocampus in birds, sex differences in spatial cognition in birds and mammals, explanations for variation in brain size, cognition in hummingbirds, and nest building in birds. She has published >100 scientific publications and has edited a book Spatial Representation in Animals. She sits on the Council of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB), serves on several editorial boards and became an Editor for Advances in the Study of Behaviour in 2014.
