Lewin, Dr Patrick

Academic background

Patrick completed his BA in Biological Sciences at Merton College, Oxford in 2021 before undertaking a DPhil in Zoology and moving to St Anne’s as a Graduate Development Scholar in 2023. His DPhil focused on the navigation of wild seabirds, particularly how they use the sun as a compass to find their way back to their breeding colonies after foraging hundreds of miles out at sea.

Teaching

Undergraduate: As a Graduate Development Scholar, Patrick taught first, second and third year MBiol students research skills. This mostly involved statistics and coding but also more general skills such as literature search and revision. Patrick also provided tutorials to external students on ecology and animal behaviour topics, and has given lessons to Universify Education residential access courses.

Research interests

Patrick’s research lies in the behavioural ecology of movement, with two main focuses. The first concerns the navigational mechanisms used by birds to orient accurately, often over hundreds or thousands of kilometres. In particular, he has studied how birds use the sun as a compass and how this links to chronobiology via the endogenous circadian clock. The second focus is collective behaviour, using collective navigation in homing pigeons as a model system to study how learning during collective actions interacts with swarm intelligence.

Recent Publications

https://www.biology.ox.ac.uk/people/patrick-lewin#tab-4618376