David J. T. Sumpter
Overview of Research
Email: david@math.uu.se
Address:
Phone: 0046 18 4713214
Mathematics Department,
Uppsala University,
Box 480,
751 06 Uppsala,
Sweden
My research aims to untangle and make sense of the web of intricate communications between animals that live in groups: to understand their collective organisation. Some of the groups I study, such as ant and human societies, are highly co-operative while others, such as swarms of locusts, are driven by a shared, but selfish desire for food or shelter. The study of these groups means addressing a number of general questions: how do societies make informed, consensus decisions?; how do ecological interactions produce population dynamics?; and how does information flow between individuals in a complex, ever changing environment? I try to answer these questions through a combination of laboratory and field experiments, computer simulations and mathematical models.
Recent publications
Sumpter, D. J. T. (2009) Collective Animal Behavior, Princeton University Press, available online.
Ward, A. J. W., Sumpter, D. J. T., Couzin, I. D., Hart, P. J. B. and Krause, J. (2008) Quorum decision-making facilitates information transfer in fish shoals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 6948-6953. [PDF]
Sumpter, D.J.T. & Brännström, Å (2008) Synergy in social communication in Social Communication (editors, D'Ettorre and Hughes), Oxford University Press. [PDF]
Sumpter, D. J. T. (2006) The principles of collective animal behaviour, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series B, 361, 5-22. [PDF]
Pratt, S. C. & Sumpter, D. J. T. (2006) A tuneable algorithm for collective decision-making, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103;15906-15910. [PDF]
Biro, D., Sumpter, D. J. T., Meade, J. & Guildford, T. (2006) From compromise to leadership in pigeon homing, Current Biology, 2006 16: 2123-2128 [PDF]
Buhl, J., Sumpter, D. J. T., Couzin, I. D., Hale, J., Despland, E., Miller, E. & Simpson, S. J. (2006) From disorder to order in locust marching, Science, 312, 1402 - 1406. [PDF]
Funding
My research is or has been funded by the Human Frontiers Science Programme (International, 2007-10), The Royal Society (UK, 2003-07), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK, 1996-99, 2000-01 & 2003-05), Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (UK, 2000) and STINT (Sweden, 2002-03).
