Dr Josh Firth

Profile

I graduated from Sheffield University in 2012 and moved to Oxford to begin my DPhil investigating social networks in natural populations. In 2016 I undertook an EGI Research Fellowship based at Oxford University’s Zoology department, then joined Merton College as a Junior Research Fellow in October 2017, and was subsequently awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship Grant in March 2019. In 2020 I moved to work primarily in Industry as a Health Researcher/Data Scientist, before returning to full-time academia in Sept 2022 as a NERC Independent Research Fellow at Oxford's Department of Biology. I joined the University of Leeds as an Associate Professor of Behavioural Ecology in January 2023.

Responsibilities

• NERC Independent Research Fellow

Research interests

My research is aimed at understanding of how ecology and individual behaviour interact to shape social structure, and the consequences of this for social processes (such as contagions) in societies. I enjoy collaborating across various topics in biology and beyond, such as using virtual systems to understand mechanisms within networks, assessing how sociality relates to health in wild mammalian populations, developing models of assessing the spread of behaviors, and working with biomedical researchers in implementing big datasets to assess human health.

For a full description of my research, please see my website:

www.FirthNetwork.com

• Contagious by Nature: Understanding Optimisation of Social Networks in Wild Populations
• Density-Dependent Welfare in Wild Bird Social Systems: Linking Individual Welfare and Resource Distributions and Disease Dynamics