We welcome ZENiT Research Fellow Yitzchak Ben Mocha to the Zukunftskolleg
Yitzchak Ben Mocha is one of our new ZENiT Research Fellows from the 1st call for applications for ZENiT Fellowships. He has started his fellowship in March and is affiliated with the Department of Biology as well as the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.
Yitzchak Ben Mocha did his PhD at the University of Konstanz and the International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS) - in close collaboration with the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Ornithology, the MPI for Animal Behavior, as well as the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Afterwards, he received a 7-month fellowship from the IMPRS for his first postdoctoral phase. “It is called an “early-bird” fellowship awarded to the PhD students who finished their PhD thesis in less than 4 years and with good grades”, Yitzchak explains. “I spent this first postdoctoral time at Judith Burkart's lab in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich.” Next, he accepted a 2-year postdoctoral position at the University of Haifa, Israel, focusing on theoretical aspects of cooperative breeding and empirical study on the communication of Eurasian coots. Since last year, he has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in the Department of Biology with Michael Griesser.
His project at the Zukunftskolleg aims to advance cooperative breeding research with a peer-reviewed and “live” Cooperative-Breeding Database (Co-BreeD). “Understanding the causes and consequences of cooperative breeding is the focus of an increasing number of comparative meta-analyses”, says the biologist. “Nevertheless, recent studies demonstrate that datasets on vertebrates include systematic methodological biases, resulting in a growing number of scholars calling for more rigorous curating work.” Co-BreeD covers key biological parameters of cooperative breeding birds, mammals and humans.
We wish him all the best for his project and for his time at the Zukunftskolleg!