Image: Jussi Puikkonen
Portrait of Wouter Halfwerk
KNAW
Wouter Halfwerk (1980) is an evolutionary biologist and assistant professor at the VU. He is interested animal communication in particular when this involves the processing of information through multiple sensory systems (multimodal communication). He started his PhD working on the evolution of bird song in relation to environmental noise at Leiden University after which he switch to working on additional sensory systems (visual/vibratory/echolocation) of bats and frogs in Tropical Panama. In his works he combines various techniques (e.g. robotics) to understand how animals process all sorts of information in order to understand how complex mating signals evolve in a world dominated by humans.