Theoretical and computational
ecology laboratory

Pol Fernàndez López

PhD Student

Graduated in Biology (Universitat de Girona) and Master in Molecular Biology and Biomedicine (Universitat de Girona), my research interests are focused on the study of model organisms, to understand highly complex interactions between animals within a group, and between animals and the environment.

More specifically, my goal is to understand how animals manipulate information, both at individual and at a collective level, and the responses that arise from this process: from individual decision-making to collective behaviour adaptation. These phenomena are particularly interesting in social animals, such as ants, in which individual information is transmitted locally and can have powerful modulatory effects in the collective behaviour (the colony).

Some of the topics of my current research are based on ant foraging strategies; how ants optimise the foraging process, how do environmental perturbations affect foraging, what are the drivers behind information exploitation versus exploration, and others. To address all these challenges, we combine theoretical, mathematical and modelling frameworks, statistical physics and novel experimental designs in the lab that, altogether, contribute to an integrative and quantitative perspective on animal behaviour.

Interests: Animal behaviour, movement ecology, complex systems, networks, information theory, decision making, computational biology.