Natasha Gillies

Biography

Natasha Gillies is a behavioural ecologist interested in movement, decision-making, and parental strategies in wild animals. She completed her PhD at University of Oxford, researching the coordination of biparental care in long-lived seabirds and the mechanisms that allow parents to negotiate their care. Her work has taken her from the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic to Svalbard in the high Arctic to investigate how seabirds make decisions in challenging and uncertain conditions. 

She is currently based at the University of Sheffield, where she holds a Leverhulme Fellowship. Her current work examines the evolutionary value of long-term partnerships, looking for the underlying patterns that connect an animal's life history to its strategy for shared parental care. Her research has been profiled in Science, Scientific American and the BBC and her writing has appeared in The Conversation.