Alex Taylor

I studied biology at Oxford University before moving to the University of Auckland to take up a Commonwealth PhD scholarship. I then worked at a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, where I was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College. In 2012 I took up a position as a Lecturer at the University of Auckland where I now lead the Animal Minds lab (https://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/research-groups/animal-minds.html). In 2014 I was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, while in 2015 I was awarded the Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Award from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

My research is defined by one question: how do animals really think? I study the minds of humans, dogs, kea and crows, using theoretical and experimental approaches from both biology and psychology, in order to gain insight into this area.