Faculty / Researchers

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Image
Corina Logan on grass with a grackle
Photo Credit
Sonia Fernandez

Corina Logan

Senior Researcher
Neuroscience Research Institute

Corina Logan's research has advanced our understanding of behavioral flexibility, linking behavior to environmental change, cognition, and success in human modified environments through a comparative and global framework. Through an innovative set of experiments, she discovered that she can manipulate flexibility in great-tailed grackles (an urban bird species), which makes them more innovative and more flexible in a new context. Through a unique reproducible research program that she founded in 2022 (ManyIndividuals), her and her collaborators are implementing this flexibility manipulation in a “Rethinking Animal Behavior” frame in species that are successful in human modified environments (grackles and blue jays) and in endangered species (Florida scrub-jays and toutouwai) to determine whether an increase in flexibility improves their success in human modified environments. This program has the potential to provide large impacts for threatened and endangered species who struggle with adapting to human modified environments. Results from this program will provide more evidence about whether flexibility was likely a key trait involved with rapid and repeated range expansions in past and present human populations.