Episode 27 - (Season 2, Episode 8) - Marisa Hoeschele

Scientist and metal drummer 

Marisa Hoeschele received an honours B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada in 2006. After that she completed an M.Sc. and PhD in Psychology with a specialization in Comparative Cognition and Behaviour at the University of Alberta, Canada.

In 2013 she moved to Vienna as a post-doc and built the budgie lab at the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. In October 2018 she started her own group, known as the “Musicality and Bioacoustics” group, at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This institute has researchers from many different disciplines all studying problems in acoustics: however the first animal studies were not conducted on site until this year in April when the budgie lab was moved to the institute. Marisa studies how different animals, including humans, perceive and produce sounds. The broader goal is to understand where music and language come from and what other similar capacities might exist in the animal kingdom.

Marisa is the first guest I've had on who had a pop filter on her mic.  That's neither here nor there but it's still a thing.

We talked, of course, about how Marisa got into the field in the first place, a bit about Austria and, obviously about her work.  Her work is interdisciplinary and we talked a bit about how this sort of thing is important not just in animal cognition, but in any field.

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Episode 26 (Season 2, Episode 7) - Jennifer Foote

Woo hoo! This one should be fun. Partly because I'm talking to.a friend and colleague from Algoma University. Also because it will be only the second episode I've done face to face. Jenn Foote came by my podcast studio (OK, look, I have two podcasting studios in my house, because I'm me, so to be clear, she came to Studio B). and we talked about her work, her origin story, and other stuff.

Jenn Foote completed a BSc. Honours in Biology from St. Mary's University, where her thesis research investigated how neighbour-stranger discrimination in song sparrows was influenced by breeding stage of females. She then moved up the road and completed MSc. in Biology at Dalhousie University where she demonstrated that Eastern song sparrows in NS share songs like west coast birds and unlike other eastern song sparrows. Both her BSc. and MSc. work was supervised by Colleen Barber. Jenn completed a PhD at Queen's with Laurene Ratcliffe where she studied dawn chorus communication networks of black-capped chickadees and demonstrated that males interact vocally at dawn and those interactions sometimes included three or more males. She then did a short postdoc with Dan Mennill at University of Windsor before moving to Algoma University in 2010. She then moved to Algoma University where her lab, the OVEN (Ornithology, Vocalization, and Ecology Network) has been studying vocal behaviour of northern Ontario songbirds. The OVEN does in fact study ovenbirds.

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Episode 20 (Season 2, Episode 1) - Jenna Congdon

Jenna was wearing PPE before it was cool

YES THE PODCAST IS BACK!

I'm really happy to be back doing these.  They take some time, so I waited until my next sabbatical.  Well, my next sabbatical is NOW.  Look, OK, I'm pretty psyched for this, but let's not make this all about me.

We open up season 2 with Jenna Congdon, who is a postdoc at York University, working with Suzanne MacDonald (who you may remember from such podcasts as 'Spit and Twitches, the Animal Cognition Podcast').

We talked some about her PhD work as well as side projects.  We also talked about her current work at the Toronto Zoo.

Jenna started out her career as a biology student at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON.  Coincidentally, I work there!  She switched over to psychology, what the cool kids take, when she took an elective with a frenetic but brilliant intro psych prof (me).  Actually, I'm a bit of a hack, don't tell anyone.  After completing her honours thesis project with me she moved on to bigger and brighter things, working with Chris Sturdy at the University of Alberta.  She got her PhD in 2019 and has been teaching as a part time faculty member at Concordia University of Edmonton and at the University of Alberta.  

She's currently working with Suzanne MacDonald, as I noted above. Look, I haven't written one of these things in a while, and, well, I'm out of practice...

As always, thanks to Red Arms for allowing me to mash up their music in the closing theme, BUY THEIR MUSIC.

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Episode 8 - Leslie Phillmore

Leslie, thinking about gene expression

Leslie Phillmore (follow her on twitter) is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Leslie received her BA (Hons) from Huron College at UWO working with Mark Cole.  (She also worked the summer between undergrad and grad school on some great stuff, and some not so great stuff when she ran birds for some postdoc in Bill Roberts' lab...)  She then went on to work with Ron Weisman at Queens University in Kingston for her MA and PhD.

Leslie's lab works on song production and perception in zebra finches and black capped chickadees. They are particularly interested in immediate early gene response in perceptual regions of the brain as well as the effects of stress on neural development and neurogenesis.

We talked about a couple of recent papers out of her lab and some stuff she just presented at SFN.

Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme. Buy their music now.



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Episode 1 - Chris Sturdy

Chris Sturdy is a professor of psychology and member of the neuroscience and mental health institute at the University of Alberta.

Chris (far right) and the members of the Songbird Neuroethology Lab

Chris has a BA in psychology from the University of Windsor as well as an MA and a PhD from Queens University in Kingston Ontario.

He studies the neuroethology of song learning and more generally songbird communication. I was really happy he wanted to be my first guest on the podcast.

We talked about a lot of different things including the influence that other researchers have had on Chris, the future of comparative cognition and the ever complicated world of gene expression in learning.

Thanks to Red Arms for allowing me to mash up their music with quotes from a bunch of people in the closing theme. Buy their music. NOW.

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