A home for updates on the reserach work of Kyriacos Kareklas and his past and present collaborators.

Kyriacos: My work is based on integrative and interdisciplinary research, with an interest in the interaction between individuals and their social and physical environment, focusing on mechanisms and functions of cognition and behaviour, phenotypic plasticity and sensory adaptation. I have worked within and between the fields of ecology, behaviour, cognition, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. I am fascinated by many taxons with past research involving corals, annelids, fish, birds, ungulates and humans. Currently I am interested in the drivers of social behaviour, focusing mainly on the development and evolution of underlying neurocognitive mechanisms.

The group's main research interest is the integrative study of social behaviour, which combines the study of proximate causes (gene modules, hormones, neural circuits, cognitive processes) and ultimate effects (evolutionary consequences). In particular, the research group aims to understand how brain and behaviour can be shaped by the social environment and how the cognitive, neural and genetic mechanisms underlying plasticity in the expression of social behaviour have evolved.

We work towards experimental evidence from hypothesis-driven research that builds on previous findings. As such our studies examine several elements related to our general topic and their interaction, addressing novel questions that progressively arise. The synthesis of our work argues for the significance of examining functional interactions between behavioural plasticity, cognition and neurobology.