Eileen Hebets

Eileen Hebets is the George Holmes Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research explores the evolution and function of animal behavior, including a focus on complex communication, sexual selection and mating systems, and navigation, sensory biology, and learning. Much of her research uses spiders and other arachnids to investigate how animals perceive and respond to their worlds. Her work on the elaborate courtship displays of spiders has helped advance conceptual frameworks for understanding complex and multimodal communication and, more recently, the role of courtship performance and signal complexity in mating success. Hebets is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Animal Behavior Society and a past President of the Animal Behavior Society. She is also deeply committed to informal science education and public engagement, particularly to using arachnids to foster curiosity about science and the natural world. At STIAS, she will extend her work in a new interdisciplinary direction, bringing animal communication into dialogue with African drumming-dance scholarship to explore performance as an integrated, embodied, and temporally organized phenomenon.