New Faculty Spotlight: Claire Hemingway
New Faculty Spotlight: Claire Hemingway
Bats, Bees, and Their Dining Decisions
Claire Hemingway joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in August 2023 as an assistant professor with a dual appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Psychology. Hemingway is a cognitive ecologist interested in how animals make decisions in complex environments. She works primarily with two systems, bats and bees, to explore how animals find and choose what to eat.
Decades of research in humans have demonstrated that people make inconsistent decisions across time and contexts, failing to behave rationally. Instead, choices often are highly influenced by a decision-maker’s recent experience and the framing of the choice. Whether choosing a meal or a mate, animals also are often confronted with multiple options simultaneously. Hemingway’s research adopts principles from economics and psychology to investigate how animals evaluate and choose between multiple options based on their signal and reward properties. She explores how species differ in decision mechanisms based on their foraging behavior and other aspects of their ecology. She also asks how certain decision mechanisms may shape the targets of those decisions, such as floral signals and rewards.
Hemingway was born and raised in Austin, Texas. She has always been passionate about nature and animal behavior. As an undergraduate, she went to St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where she began her research career investigating mate choice behaviors in livebearing fishes, such as guppies, mosquitofish, and sailfin mollies. She then completed a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation research focused on decision-making strategies in Neotropical bats. For her dissertation research, she conducted all of her fieldwork at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She then went on to do post-doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin, studying decision-making behaviors in bumblebees choosing between flowers that vary in their floral signals and rewards. In Tennessee, Hemingway is now focusing on several native bumblebee species, as well as continuing to conduct laboratory-based studies with captive bumblebee colonies. She will also continue to study Neotropical bats in Panama.
While not hanging out in jungles or meadows following bats and bees, Hemingway enjoys running, hiking, and camping. She has only just begun to explore all the local trails and parks close to Knoxville. She is also a huge fan of live music and is excited to explore the bluegrass music of East Tennessee.