Dr. Lauren Guillette is the Principal Investigator of the Animal Cognition Research Group and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Members of her team have a broad interest in animal behaviour, with a particular focus on how learning and cognitive abilities allow animals to solve problems they face in the wild. Dr. Guillette and her team investigate the causes and consequences of variation in these critical abilities. Most recently, Dr. Guillette has been using nest-building behaviour in birds as a model system to examine social learning and the evolution of cognition. She has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada since 2019.

Dr. Guillette has been recognized with many awards, including the inaugural Early Career Award from the Comparative Cognition Society (2021) and the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star award (2017). She was named the 2020 Science Fellow at the Telus World of Science, Edmonton and won an Animal Behaviour Society Outreach Grant (2021) to support her team’s efforts in scientific outreach.

Dr. Guillette has worked at several universities around the world, experimentally testing cognitive abilities in animals. She was awarded a Royal Society Newton International Fellowship, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Anniversary Future Leaders Fellowship, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for her work on social learning at the University of St Andrews, UK. Before that, Dr. Guillette obtained a PhD from the University of Alberta, studying among-individual variation in cognitive abilities in wild-caught black-capped chickadees. She also earned an MA from Mount Holyoke College, USA, studying the adaptive significance of associative learning in larval antlions, which are a sit-and-wait predator.

Faculty Profile
Animal Cognition Research Group
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Contact Information
Lauren Guillette, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Comparative Cognition & Behaviour
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Email: guillett@ualberta.ca