Grace McKenzie-Smith is an assistant professor in physics studying animal behavior. She uses high resolution imaging and machine learning to capture and quantify the behavior of freely moving insects such as fruit flies and ants, and searches for models that can explain the underlying structure of individual and social actions. She is particularly interested in how social systems can make collective decisions based off of information held by only a few individuals. Grace completed her Ph.D. and postdoc at Princeton University, where she studied the effects of social isolation on bumblebee behavior, and the long-timescale structure of fruit fly behavior. In her free time, Grace enjoys playing board games, reading scifi/fantasy, and singing.
Hailey Hutchison is an undergraduate researcher in the class of 2027 originally from Guilford, Connecticut. At Wesleyan, she is majoring in Physics and working in the McKenzie-Smith lab to track the motion of ants in order to explore their social and nonsocial behavior patterns and the evolution of these phenotypes. In her free time, she enjoys spending time outdoors and rowing with Wesleyan women’s crew.
Henry Kops is a rising senior (‘26) who has spent nearly his entire life in Connecticut, having grown up in Killingworth, graduating Cum Laude from Choate Rosemary Hall, and now attending Wesleyan University and residing in New Haven. He is a double major in Physics and Astronomy; but when he isn’t doing laboratory physics work or looking through a telescope, Henry can be found sitting at a drum set, at the movie theaters, or at home by a fire pit. In the future, Henry hopes to continue investigating and traveling the world, all whilst listening to and performing music.
Alex Temidis is a 2nd year graduate student, currently looking into methods of markerless identity tracking for animals based on unique behavior patterns. Employing machine learning, such as computer vision and convolutional neural networks, he hopes to find a method of distinguishing individuals by the way they perform a particular behavior. Further, he hopes to apply this method to track ants and fruit flies in social groups to understand how individual interactions affect the group through various social experiments. In his limited free time, Alex enjoys singing, rock climbing, and pondering the big questions of the universe.