A new lab launching at Columbia in 2026.
Principal Investigator
Aya's research sits at the interface of behavioral and neuro-ecology, how animals perceive their environment, make decisions, and adjust their activities under ecological pressure, and how these adjustments shape cognition, behavior, and fitness. Over the past decade she has revealed key aspects of bat cognition in the wild, providing the first evidence in the animal kingdom that a species can use a cognitive map for navigation, and later showing that bats can also do this using echolocation alone.
