Stefano Ghirlanda

The Graduate Center, CUNY, City College of New York

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About

Stefano Ghirlanda is a leading researcher at the intersection of animal behavior, evolutionary biology, and robotics. His key research areas include social learning, collective behavior, and the application of ethorobotics—the use of robotic animals to study natural behavior. Ghirlanda’s major contributions lie in experimentally investigating how animals learn from one another, particularly through innovative robotic interfaces. In his highly cited 2019 work on zebrafish, he demonstrated that robotic fish can serve as effective social partners to study observational learning, revealing how zebrafish learn to solve tasks like opening doors by watching a robotic conspecific. This approach, which has garnered over 14 citations, bridges the gap between controlled laboratory experiments and natural social dynamics. Ghirlanda’s work has significantly advanced our understanding of social learning mechanisms, showing that even simple robotic models can elicit complex learning behaviors. His research is notable for its interdisciplinary nature, combining robotics, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory to address fundamental questions about how animals acquire information from their social environment. Ghirlanda’s findings have implications for both basic science and applied fields, including animal welfare and the design of autonomous systems.