Professor Theresa Burt de Perera

I came to Oxford as a DPhil student before progressing to a Junior Research Fellowship at Keble College, and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. I joined St John's in 2010 as an Associate Professor in Zoology.

Teaching

I teach whole organism biology, focusing on sensory ecology and animal behaviour.

I research into the behavioural mechanisms of spatial cognition, those fundamental processes that allow animals to navigate effectively through their environment. My group uses theoretical and empirical approaches to study the senses that animals use to obtain information, and to explore how this information is learned, remembered and recalled to enable efficient navigation.

Selected publications

Adelaide Sibeaux, Cait Newport, Jonathan P. Green, Cecilia Karlsson , Jacob Engelmann, Theresa Burt de Perera 2024. Taking a shortcut: route integration in fish? Nature Communications Biology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06179-5

Sibeaux, A.; Karlsson, C.; Newport, C.; Burt de Perera, T. 2022. Distance estimation in the goldfish (Carassius auratus). Proc. R. Soc. B 289: 20221220. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1220

Karlsson, C; Willis, J.; Patel, M.; Burt de Perera, T. 2022. Visual odometry of Rhinecanthus aculeatus depends on the visual density of the environment. Nature Comms Biology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03925-5

Davis, V.; Holbrook, R.; Burt de Perera, T. 2022. Fish can use hydrostatic pressure to determine their absolute depth. Nature Comms Biology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02749-z

Newport, C.; Padget, O.; and Burt de Perera, T., ‘High turbidity levels alter coral reef fish movement trajectories in a foraging task’, Scientific Reports, 11, 5975 (2021)

Schumacher, S., Burt de Perera, T., Thenert, J. and von der Emde, G., ‘Cross-modal object recognition and dynamic weighting of sensory inputs in a fish’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 76387643 (2016)

Awards and distinctions

Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation

L’Oreal UK Fellowship for Women in Science (2007)

EPA Junior Research Fellowship, Keble College, University of Oxford