Elli Leadbeater, Professor in Ecology and Evolution, in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour at Royal Holloway was recently awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London for her outstanding research on the ecology and evolution of social insects.
Professor Elli Leadbeater
The ZSL Scientific Medal is a prestigious award for outstanding contributions by an early career researcher. The award citation acknowledges that Elli Leadbeater has been at the forefront of using techniques from behavioural ecology and applying them to understand the challenges facing pollinators, the social insects ‐ ants, bees and wasps.
The society recognises Elli's valuable contribution in an area where every research contribution makes a difference to the bigger picture,
“Her research questions target evolutionary and also proximate causation of behaviour: what cognitive processes are important in social behaviour, and when and how did they evolve? What are the adaptive benefits of being social? And she answers these questions in the context of key species under threat from pesticides and habitat degradation.”
The award citation highlights the impact of Elli Leadbeater’s research to understand how a globally threatened pollinator behaves and how human-induced change might affect that behaviour.
“Elli’s insights into pollinator behaviour have direct relevance to the challenge of ensuring pollination success in both natural populations and in agriculture. Elli’s early research showed that bumblebees are capable of observational learning in a foraging context and that their stimulus choice is determined by what they learn from co-specifics. She then extended her analyses to copying and robbing behaviour, and later, focused on how selection shapes animal brains to promote social learning and on the role of cooperation between unrelated nest-mates for colony success. Her more recent work has addressed the question of how urban environments affect pollinator activities and survival, and how pesticides and other forms of environmental stress affect pollinators. It is our pleasure to present Elli with the ZSL Scientific Medal.”
