Professional development events

Mentoring Opportunities at the ASAB Winter Virtual Meeting

We will be running a series of mentoring sessions at the ASAB Winter Virtual Meeting in order to support delegates and assist their professional development. These will be small groups (~10 people) structured by career stage (UG/MSc/PhD/Postdoc) where you can meet with your peers and discuss issues relevant to your professional development both amongst yourselves and with more established academics who may offer a different perspectives. Each group will last an hour and they will be held on Friday 4 Dec between 12:30 and 14:15 during the ‘lunch break’. This is the start of an ongoing mentorship scheme that ASAB is developing, but your involvement now doesn’t mean you are committed to anything in the future.

If you are an established academic: Would you be willing to co-host a mentor group for an hour? If so, please let Ellen Williams ([email protected]) know and let her know if there is any particular constraints on your time availability in that slot (12:30-14:15) or if you’d like to mentor a particular career stage. We hope that there will be 2 mentors per session to share the effort and give different perspectives, and if you’d like to work with someone in particular, please approach them and let Ellen know that you have an established pairing. Otherwise, Ellen will allocate you a partner.

If you are a more junior delegate: Would you like to join a group? If so, please let Ellen Williams ([email protected]) know and let her know your career stage and she can allocate you to a group accordingly.

The number of groups will depend on the number of delegates and mentors who sign up. Please could you reply to Ellen by Thursday 26 November to register your interest.

We look forward to seeing you at the meeting.

We need you!

Science Cafes at the ASAB Virtual Winter Meeting

During the Thursday and Friday lunchbreaks ~12:00-14:00 GMT on Thursday 3 & Friday 4 December we invite delegates to organise and host a themed Science Café event.

These will be ‘mini-symposia’ where researchers with a common interest can meet together for an hour. What you do is up to you: Panel discussion, small group chat; micro-talks; methods workshop – so many possibilities. If you’d like to propose a theme (e.g. Chicken Welfare; Modelling Movement; Impacts of Human noise; Comparative Cognition et. Etc.) then we will advertise those themes to other delegates and provide them with a Zoom link to join you. You can deliberately invite certain people to participate as well as making them open to any delegate with a shared interest.

If you would like to host one of these, please send an email to: [email protected] with a Title, 2-3 lines outlining what you intend to cover and, if you like, a picture for advertising it. If we have similar proposals, we will put you in contact with one another to devise a collaborative café. Please submit proposals by Friday 20 November.

What do we have lined up?

Professional Development and Social Events

New to reviewing or publishing?

Executive Editor of Animal Behaviour Sue Healy will provide some reviewing/publishing tips

ASAB, in conjunction with the ABS, publish Animal Behaviour. First published in 1953, Animal Behaviour is a leading international publication and has wide appeal, containing critical reviews, original papers, and research articles on all aspects of animal behaviour. Book Reviews and Books Received sections are also included. The Editor, Sue Healy, will host a discussion explaining the process of submitting work to Animal Behaviour and how to get involved in reviewing such work.

Meet the Editor: Royal Society Journals

Drop in for a Q&A with Professor Innes Cuthill (Reviews Editor for Proceedings B), Professor Stuart Semple (Editorial Board member of Biology Letters) and Helen Eaton (Senior Commissioning Editor of Philosophical Transactions B). They will be discussing a range of aspects relating to journals publishing, such as open access, ethics, preprints, data archiving etc., and will take questions from the audience. You can also find out a bit more about publishing in the Royal Society’s journals.

Mentoring and Networking Opportunities

ASAB recognises that animal behaviour researchers are often working in isolated situations, either because of fieldwork, the rather niche nature of our field or because at the current time, face-to-face meetings are difficult. Following on from a successful series of mentoring and networking meetings at the ASAB Virtual Summer Meeting, we’d like to help delegates to meet others to share interests and support with one another. A group of ASAB Council and members are currently developing a cross-stage & cross-institution networking scheme that we will trial at the Winter meeting.

Hover: The music of the bees

Sally Beamish is a composer inspired by the natural world. She will talk about her recent composition, Hover, that draws on the behaviour of bees as an introduction to Lars Chittka’s plenary.

Meet the Grant Secretary

ASAB offers Research Grants of up to £10,000 support (i) promising pilot research projects that are at too early a stage to attract funding from larger funding agencies such as the UK Research Councils, and (ii) small-scale projects, that, although worthwhile, are unlikely to attract funding from alternative sources. The Grants Secretary, Kate Lessells, will host a discussion covering what the Grants Committee looks for in an application

The Thursday Night Social

Grab your drinks, pull up a comfy chair and ignore the curfews. It’s the Thursday Night Social. Ideas include Virtual Pictionary, Scavenger Hunts, Quizzes, Karaoke, Who’d win in a fight between… etc all with an animal theme.

Kirsty Graham and team will be looking for your suggestions and participation. Please contact them if you have inspiration!