Rate My Professor Ellen Garland

Ellen Garland is a Reader in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include animal culture, social learning, bioacoustics, and behavioural ecology, with a primary focus on cetaceans and the cultural transmission, vocal learning, and function of humpback whale song. She completed her PhD in bioacoustics at the University of Queensland in 2011. Garland holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Her work has examined patterns of song transmission across ocean basins and the structural similarities between whale song and human language. Recent publications include studies on whale song complexity in the North-western Pacific and analyses of paternity patterns in recovering humpback whale populations. She has contributed to edited volumes on the evolution of cetacean societies and vocal cultures in cetaceans. Garland collaborates with researchers on projects involving cultural evolution and conservation in baleen whales.

She supervises PhD students in related areas of cetacean ecology. Her contributions advance understanding of cultural transmission in non-human animals and its implications for conservation.