Prof Karen Mccomb
| Post: | Emeritus Professor (Animal Behaviour & Cognition) (Psychology) |
| Location: | PEVENSEY 1 2B09 |
| Email: | karenm@sussex.ac.uk |
Biography
BSc (1st Class Hons), Edinburgh 1984; PhD, Cambridge 1988.
Research Fellow, Newnham College Cambridge, 1990-1993; Research Associate, University of Minnesota, 1989.
First appointed lecturer at Sussex in 1993 and promoted to Professor of Animal Behaviour & Cognition in 2013. I am on the Editorial board of Bioacoustics and have acted as academic editor for PLoS ONE and Consulting Editor for Animal Behaviour. I am also a past Council Member for the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and currently part of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) / Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) specialist group on animal culture and social complexity.
I was awarded the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize 2008/2009 for outstanding originality and scientific excellence, along with my team when we produced the first experimental evidence for cross-modal individual recognition in non-human animals.
Role
I am Emeritus Professor of Animal Behaviour and Cognition at Sussex. Having completed my teaching and admin roles including convening a final year module on animal communication and chairing the Postgraduate Exam Board, I am now focused on writing a book on understanding animals.
Community and Business
I have always been keen to make sure our key finidings about animal communication, cognition and emotion reach the attention of the general public and am currently writing a popular book on understanding animals based around my work. My elephant research was covered in BBC’s “Inside the Animal Mind” and my previous horse research was filmed for the BBC series “Talk to the Animals”, both aired in 2014. More recently our work on emotional awareness in horses had major coverage in a multiple prize-winning CBC documentary “Equus: Story of the Horse” (2019) and appeared in the Off the Fence production "Wild Talk" (2024). I am also talking about my cat research in the upcoming National Geographic / Disney documentary "Sentient" to be released on Disney Plus in 2026.
Other publicity includes being interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme four times for different research stories, featuring multiple times on the BBC TV news, and being interviewed for ITV’s News at Ten. This and numerous other interviews on radio and TV, and stories in major newspapers and magazines (as far reaching as The Economist) has given our findings major publicity world-wide.
My research webpages (Mammal Communication & Cognition Research) can be found at:
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/labs/mammal-communication-and-cognition/