E-mail:
Personal web site: https://sites.google.com/site/nkutsukakee/
Lab web site: https://sites.google.com/site/sokendarwineng/
The observation of animals leads us to a number of questions such as "How do animals live?", "Why do animals behave in a certain way?", " What do animals know and understand?", and "Why are there so many species?" A goal of my studies is to understand animal behavior and ecology from a standpoint of evolution. I have two ongoing projects. The first one is on social evolution in group-living mammals. I want to know how individuals should behave in order to maximize their (inclusive) fitness in a complex social environment. So far, I have been working on cooperation, conflict, conflict resolution, and communication in mammals and other vertebrates (birds and fish). The second one is on phenotypic evolution and comparative approaches with information of phylogeny. I am applying a new computational framework of phylogenetic comparative analyses to complex and heterogeneous data to infer processes of trait evolution.