My main research interests lie in behavioural and evolutionary biology.
Within this area I model the behaviour of organisms, attempting to give
adaptive explanations of observed behaviour. The models are state and time-
dependent stochastic control models and their analysis uses results from
Markov decision processes and game theory. Much of the work is collaborative,
particularly with other members of the Behavioural Biology Group at Bristol.
Specific topic of current interest include:
State dependent life histories. Here I am concerned with how physiological
and other state variables mediate life history trade-offs.
Dynamic games. Game theoretical model often need to be state dependent and
dynamic if they are to capture important aspect of the biology of a system.
I am interested in general properties of solutions and method of computation,
as well as in specific games such as brood desertion in birds and games of
parental effort.
Fluctuating environments. In fluctuating environments there is no
individual optimisation. The makes it much more difficult to find optimal
strategies than in constant environments. I have been developing general
charactarisations of optimal strategies in fluctuating environments. These
charactarisations lead to methods for computing optima.