From genes to ecosystems, and individuals to social groups, we want to know how do organisms, well, organize?
Through our research, we are on a quest to uncover how organisms collect information about their world, how they share that information with others, and ultimately how they prioritize information and organize as a group to affect change in their environment.
But behavior alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
We put behaviors studied in the lab back into the field, under the same or different conditions. Our goal is to understand the social, environmental, and physiological contexts that shape behavior - especially when organisms are working together!
What we do
Major themes in our research
Featured
Main Projects
Influence of the social environment on group behavior
We study foraging and thermoregulation in honey bees to understand emergent collective behavior.
Specifically, we study two behaviors: collective fanning and collective foraging. These behaviors provide the perfect multi-level framework to study collective cognition.
Neurobiological & Genetic Basis Of Social Behavior
We use transcriptomics and neurophysiology to understand social behavior.
Specifically, we investigate how the reward system in social and sub-social bees may function and be selected to reinforce social behaviors. We aim to utilize contemporary techniques to study a variety of social behavior.
Startup Company
HiveTech Solutions
Honeybees are one of the most important pollinators in the world.
In the past 20 years, honeybee populations have declined dramatically, as demand for their services continues to increase. Beekeepers need new tools to mitigate health issues with their bees.
Dr. Cook is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of HiveTech Solutions. With support from the USDA, they are developing methods for over-wintering honeybees more effectively and for better understanding of how individual- and colony-level physiology changes with over-wintering strategies.
Why this work matters
We use our research to share knowledge, passion, and excitement about science.
We want our work to change the world by showing people that behavior is more nuanced than what happens in a controlled lab setting, and that complex societies can be studied to understand mechanisms of how groups may be resilient to change.
