Individualisation Symposium 2025

25 March 2025

The Joint Institute for Individualisation in a Changing Environment (JICE), the collaborative research association InChangE and the Transregio Collaborative Research Centre 212 cordially invite all interested persons to the fourth issue of the interdisciplinary Individualisation Symposium at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University on Tuesday, 25 March 2025.

The event brings together researchers from various disciplines of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities to facilitate the discourse on current findings and new perspectives in individualisation research across disciplinary boundaries.

This year's symposium is dedicated to integrating human and animal research – with a particular focus on transitional periods and turning points across the lifespan.

Individualisation Smyposium 2025 – Poster
Individualisation Symposium 2025 – Programme
 

Active participation

There will be the opportunity to present and discuss one's own scientific contribution to exploring causes, mechanisms and consequences of individualisation as a talk or a poster at the Individualisation Symposium.

Abstract submission deadline: 23 February 2025

Travel grants

To support participation of early and mid-career researchers at the Individualisation Symposium, the JICE offers travel grants of up to 1,000 €.

Speakers

• Ingela Alger

  Economics | Toulouse School of Economics & Centre for Economic Policy Research

  

  »On the evolutionary foundations of intra-family resource sharing«

  Ingela Alger is an economist at Toulouse School of Economics, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the University of Toulouse Capitole, the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). By combining economic theory with evolutionary biology, she is committed to understanding the origins of human preferences and motivations as well as the influence of our evolutionary past in shaping our behaviour within the family, such as paternal investment and sharing of resources between men and women.

  Website of Ingela Alger
   

• Camilla Cenni

  Cross-Cultural Social and Personality Psychology | University of Mannheim

  

  »Stable individual differences in object play as a pathway to tool use emergence in a non-human primate species«

  Camilla Cenni is an ethologist at the Chair of Cross-Cultural Social and Personality Psychology at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim. Her cross-species research interest includes social learning and behavioural innovation, the role of individual differences in cultural evolution as well as tool use, play behavior and material culture.

  Website of Camilla Cenni
   

• Michael H. Goldstein

  Developmental Psychobiology | Cornell University

  

  »From birds to words: A comparative approach to the development of communication«

  Michael H. Goldstein is a professor of developmental psychobiology at the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, where he researches how infants learn to talk through studies on songbirds and humans. Using a unique comparative approach, he delves into which social interactions between caregivers and offspring shape language acquisition. In this way, he improves our understanding of how communication and language develop and the social and cognitive forces underlying these processes.

  Website of Michael H. Goldstein
   

• Maria Moiron

  Evolutionary and Behavioural Ecology | Bielefeld University

  

  »Evaluating the existence and magnitude of indirect genetic effects using a meta-analytical approach«

  Maria Moiron is an evolutionary and behavioural ecologist at the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Bielefeld University. Her research focuses on how rapidly changing environmental conditions influence adaptive responses in wild animal populations as well as on the causes and consequences of individual differences in labile traits such as behaviour, life history and physiology.

  Website of Maria Moiron
   

• Bastian Mönkediek

  Sociology | Bielefeld University

  

  »What makes us so different? Individualisation processes in the life course from a behavioural-genetic perspective«

  Bastian Mönkediek is a sociologist at the research unit Social Structure and Social Inequality at Bielefeld University. He is one of the project leaders of the German Twin Family Panel “TwinLife”, which combines research approaches from different disciplines, such as sociology, psychology and human genetics, in a longitudinal study on twin pairs and their families. This sheds light on how social inequalities develop over the life course, taking genetic and social forces as well as their interplay into account.

  Website of Bastian Mönkediek [de]
   

• Barbara Natterson-Horowitz

  Cardiology & Evolutionary Biology | Harvard University & University of California, Los Angeles

  

  »The moody animal: The ancient origins of ‘ups and downs’«

  Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research turns to the animal world to solve human health challenges – from heart failure and breast cancer to anxiety disorders and infertility. Through her best-selling books "Zoobiquity" and "Wildhood", she highlights similarities between humans and non-human animals, revealing a new species-spanning approach to health and development.

  Website of Barbara Natterson-Horowitz
   

JICE Travel Grants

The Joint Institute for Individualisation in a Changing Environment (JICE) offers travel grants of up to 1,000 € for early and mid-career researchers (master’s students to postdocs) to attend the Individualisation Symposium 2025.

Application

Applications for a travel grant can be submitted via the following online form:
Travel grant application

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the total funding volume has been expended. Candidates will be notified as soon as possible after the decision on their application has been made.

As part of your application, you will be asked to answer the following questions:

1. Which impulses for your scientific work or career do you hope to obtain from your attendance?
2. How does your own scientific work relate to individualisation?

Additional information

The travel grant can be used to cover your costs for travel to and from Bielefeld and accommodation for the night before and after the Individualisaton Symposium, if travel is not easily feasible on the same day. The incurred costs need to be covered by the grant recipients in advance and will be reimbursed up to a maximum amount of 1,000 € after the travel has been completed.

Reimbursement is subject to local laws concerning travel costs for university members and guests (Landesreisekostengesetz). Therefore, we can reimburse incurred costs for travel from your current place of residence to Bielefeld and back as well as accommodation of up to 80 €/night. If there is no accommodation available within this limit, you will have to submit documents proving this (e.g. screenshots/offers) when submitting the invoice. Please note that we require invoices to reimburse you, i.e. private accommodation can usually not be covered.

Please contact us if you have any questions: contact@jice.info