Nigel R. Franks
About
Nigel R. Franks is an English emeritus professor of Animal Behaviour and Ecology at the University of Bristol. He obtained a BSc and PhD in biology at the University of Leeds. After receiving his BSc in 1977 he began his PhD, during which he spent two years doing field work in Panama on army ants with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He was awarded the Thomas Henry Huxley Award in 1980 from the Zoological Society of London for the best British PhD in Zoology. He then received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851 allowing him to undertake postdoctoral work under Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University before becoming a lecturer at the University of Bath in 1982, later being promoted to full professor in 1995. He moved to the University of Bristol in 2001. He is renowned for his studies of collective animal behaviour, particularly of ant colonies. His Ant Lab at Bristol pioneered the use of Temnothorax as a model ant species for the study of collective decision-making and complex systems. In a 2009 profile in Science he discusses his pioneering use of radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) glued to the backs of each ant for tracking individuals in their society. His book Social evolution in ants with Andrew Bourke was an important contribution to the understanding of kin selection theory and sex ratio theory with respect to social evolution in insects, while his co-authored book Self-organization in biological systems has been cited well over 3000 times
