Topic: neuroethology

Establish an independent research group investigating the neural circuits controlling animal behaviour or developing innovative technologies for neuroethology. The institute provides start-up, personnel and operating resources within an interdisciplinary research environment. The W2 appointment initially runs for six years, with a possible three-year extension and a negotiable start date. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to a selection symposium in Bonn on 21 January 2027.

Multi-animal pose estimation is essential for studying animals' social behaviors in neuroscience and neuroethology. Advanced approaches have been proposed to support multi-animal estimation and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, these models rarely exploit unlabeled data during training even though real-world applications have exponentially more unlabeled frames than labeled frames. Manually adding dense annotations for a large number of images is costly and labor-intensive, especially for multiple instances. To reduce the need for laborious human labeling, we propose a semi-superv

The vast majority of natural animal behavior involves far more than passive perception and reflexive responses. Indeed, animals actively move themselves in the world and systematically collect sensory observations over time; such active sensing allows them to infer environmental states that are not directly measurable, which ultimately guide ethologically important behaviors. One clear example of such a behavior is odor plume localization in flying insects. By changing their speed and turning, insects produce variations in their multisensory inputs that, once integrated over time, can resolve