AWC 2021 Panel
Dr. Daniel Weary
Dan Weary is a Professor at The University of British Columbia where he co-founded the Animal Welfare Program and co-directs this active research group. His research focuses on developing behavioral measures for the objective assessment of animal welfare and developing practical methods of improving the welfare of animals. Dan has published hundreds of scientific papers, is the most highly cited author in his field, and has received many awards for his scholarship including the Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Animal Welfare Science by the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, the Award for Excellence in Dairy Science from the American Dairy Science Association, and the Creativity Award from the International Society of Applied Ethology. Dan is also the only agricultural scholar in Canada to have received the prestigious NSERC Industrial Research Chair for five consecutive 5-year periods.
Presentation title: Listening to animals: how hearing their voice can improve decisions about animal care and use
Ms. Alice Ayres
An SFU Masters Student in Cognitive and Neural Science, involved in research in both the Translational Neuroscience Lab and Circadian Rhythms Lab, with a focus on learning and memory.
During undergraduate neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, Alice gained experience with various model species and research approaches. She became interested in memory research in the Morris Lab, designing appetitive, multipurpose behavioural paradigms for rats, which would more efficiently collect nuanced data on translationally relevant neural processes.
Preferring rodents to the worms of her c.elegans projects, Alice joined research labs at SFU where she could apply her passion for innovative experimental design to the relationship between sleep and learning. Sleep and biological rhythms are ubiquitous, and are complex areas of neuroscience whose careful study continues to help us understand more about the conscious (and, indeed, unconscious) brain. Currently her labs are focused on progressive research methods such as touchscreen cognitive testing to determine the relationship between sleep and Alzheimers Disease, and the development of effective data collection in semi-natural conditions in an effort to better simulate how an animals’ brain would engage with its environment in real life.
Twitter: @Alice_I_Ayres
Presentation title: Consciousness of progressive experimental design in neuroscience: informing research and welfare
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Dr. Alison Vaughan
Dr. Alison Vaughan is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow, BSc., MSc., PhD and is originally from the Isle of Skye in Scotland, Dr. Ali’s experiences with animals have taken her all over the world including Australia, Spain, Mongolia, and now finally Canada. Ali holds a science degree (BSc hons) in Applied Animal Behaviour Science from the University of Lincoln in the UK.
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Watch her TedTalk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n_fNdJT4Tk&ab_channel=TEDxTalks.
Keynote speaker
Ms. Alexis Devine
Alexis Devine is an artist and entrepreneur hailing from Seattle, Washington. Her sheepadoodle Bunny, known as "What About Bunny" on social media became an internet sensation in the fall of 2020 when videos of her communicating with assistive technology from FluentPet went viral. Bunny now has over one hundred buttons individually programmed with various words that she uses to communicate how she feels, what she wants, to express when she is in pain and even to chat about her dreams. She is part of an ongoing canine cognition research study at the Comparative Cognition Lab at UCSD. They have recently added a standard Poodle to the family named Otter who Alexis is training with the same system. Alexis' goal is to further our understanding of the power of connection and importance of two-way communication, meeting her dogs where they are and understanding them on their terms first to facilitate trust and promote an environment that supports them as the incredible creatures they are.
Instagram @whataboutbunny
Ms. Hannah Griebling​
As humans increasingly reside in cities, it is crucial to understand how human behavior and the heterogeneous, urban environment impacts animal behavior and cognition, and vice versa, especially in ‘nuisance’ species such as the raccoon. PhD student Hannah Gribling's research resides at the intersection of non-human animal cognition and behavior and urban socio-ecological environments (e.g., human demographics and behavior, access to urban greenspace/habitat, and environmental harshness). She is interested in how humans’ perceptions, interactions and conflicts with urban raccoons may impact raccoons’ behavior and cognitive abilities, and how and why this may vary across neighborhoods within Vancouver.
Presentation title: Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoffs in Problem Solving in Captive Raccoons (Procyon lotor)