Prof. Dr. Iain Couzin

Max Planck Insti­tute for Behav­ioral Biology and Univer­sity of Konstanz

Iain Couzin is Direc­tor of the Max Planck Insti­tute of Animal Behav­ior and holds the Chair of Collec­tive Behav­iour at the Univer­sity of Konstanz, where he also serves as Speaker of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collec­tive Behav­iour. He has pioneered the scien­tific study of collec­tive animal behav­ior, helping trans­form it from a descrip­tive phenom­e­non into a funda­men­tal theory of how intel­li­gence and decision-making can emerge beyond the individ­ual. By devel­op­ing the theoret­i­cal frame­work now known as the “Couzin model”, together with novel exper­i­men­tal and compu­ta­tional method­olo­gies, he showed that mobile animal groups such as flocks, schools, and herds function as distrib­uted infor­ma­tion-process­ing systems.

His work provided the founda­tions required to reveal how inter­ac­tion networks among organ­isms give rise to collec­tive intel­li­gence, opening a largely unexplored scale of cogni­tion. His research further showed that collec­tives can exhibit memory, leader­ship, effec­tive decision-making, and robust democ­ra­tic consen­sus without central­ized control, princi­ples that transcend species and system specifics. This research has helped reshape how intel­li­gence is under­stood across scales and now informs work in physics, engineer­ing, and complex­ity science.

Iain Couzin is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Founda­tion (DFG), the Lagrange Prize (for funda­men­tal contri­bu­tions to complex­ity science), the Rothschild Distin­guished Fellow­ship at the Univer­sity of Cambridge, the President’s Medal of the Royal Entomo­log­i­cal Society, the Scien­tific Medal of the Zoolog­i­cal Society of London, and the Fyssen Inter­na­tional Prize.

Biology / Complex­ity Science

Research Fields