The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin is pleased to announce that a joint professorship with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin called "Evolutionary Ethology" has been established to provide basic research on acoustic communication, animal culture, biolinguistics and biomusicality, and the co-evolution of social and vocal complexity.
The professorship appointment of Prof. Mirjam Knörnschild consolidates Berlin as an internationally renowned location for bioacoustic research and enables the expansion of the Museum für Naturkunde's Animal Sound Archive. Additionally, Prof. Knörnschild is committed to communicating the importance of ethological research to the public, e.g. by participating in scientific outreach activities such as Wissenschaft im Sauriersaal and the Beats & Bones podcast.
At the museum, she is also part of the leadership team of the Dynamics of Nature science programme as well as the SoundEvolution research cluster as part of our Future Plan.
Prof. Knörnschild explores the formation and evolution of dialects as well as the importance of cultural selection for speciation in animals. She also conducts research on the evolution of human language and musicality from a comparative perspective with animals. She decodes animal "language" to evaluate its information content, function and complexity. Her research focuses on bats, which are among the most diverse and acoustically versatile mammals taxon.
Learn more also on the website of Mirjam Knörnschild.