Dr. Hannah Williams
Hannah J. Williams is a behavioural ecologist whose research focuses on the fundamental processes that shape movement decisions in animals. Leader of the Move.inFormation research group at the University of Konstanz as a VolkswagenStiftung Freigeist Fellow.
Her work explores how organisms navigate complex environments in which the energetic consequences of movement are uncertain and constantly changing. By integrating behavioural ecology with physics and information theory, she investigates how animals perceive environmental energy, how they use social cues to reduce uncertainty, and how these processes shape movement patterns across scales.
Hannah’s path into this work began in the field, building and deploying bio-logging tags across an unusually broad sweep of the animal kingdom — killer whales and humpback whales, gannets and albatrosses, vultures and Andean condors, and even bees and human paraglider pilots. Working hands-on across so many species, in water and in air, made one thing increasingly clear: beneath the diversity of bodies and behaviours lay a shared set of physical constraints. The same questions of lift, drag, and the cost of transport recurred whether an animal was diving, flapping, or soaring. This realisation drew her from cataloguing movement toward understanding its underlying physics — and then to a further step, recognising that animals rarely solve these physical problems alone. Her focus now is on the collective dimension of movement: how groups of individuals moving through moving media — air and water that are themselves in constant, turbulent flux — sense, share, and exploit the energy around them, turning a private physical challenge into a social one.
