Rate My Professor Lars Chittka

Professor Lars Chittka is Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. He earned his Diploma in Biology with first-class honours from the Free University of Berlin and completed his PhD summa cum laude in Biology there in 1993 under the supervision of Randolf Menzel. Chittka founded the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary University of London in 2008 and served as its scientific director until 2012. His research focuses on the intersection of sensory physiology, learning psychology, and evolutionary ecology, using pollinator-plant interactions as a primary model system with particular emphasis on bees. He has conducted extensive studies on bee behaviour, cognition, colour vision, learning, navigation, and their ecological interactions with flowers.

Chittka has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles and is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee, published in 2022. He co-edited the volume Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He has served as an editor of PLoS Biology since 2004 and has held editorial roles with Proceedings of the Royal Society B and the Quarterly Review of Biology. Chittka is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and an ERC Advanced Grant. He received the Lesley Goodman Award of the Royal Entomological Society in 2006. He is an elected Fellow of the Linnean Society, the Royal Entomological Society, and the Royal Society of Biology.