David WheatcroftAssociate Professor

About me

I am broadly interested in avian communication from acoustic, behavioral, comparative, and neurogenomic perspectives. Most of our current research aims to understand the interactions between experience-dependent and -independent factors that determine song learning in birds.

Juvenile songbirds must learn the (variable) songs of their own species, but are exposed to the songs from a wide variety of other species throughout their life. How do they focus learning onto appropriate songs?

Our work integrates behavioural experiments with neurogenomic assays to address this question using the pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, as our model system.