Songbird Neuroethology Laboratory

Department of Psychology, BioCognition Unit, Centre for Neuroscience, University of Alberta

Christopher B. Sturdy, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Associate Chair, Research
 

Chris Sturdy completed a B.A. in Psychology at the University of Windsor (Windsor, ON, Canada) in 1994 where he studied spatial memory in rats with Jerry Cohen. He then completed an M.A. in 1997 and a Ph.D. in 2000 in Psychology at Queen's University (Kingston, ON, Canada) where he examined songbird bioacoustics, cognition and neuroscience with Ron Weisman. From 2000 to 2001, Sturdy worked at the Duke University Medical Center (Durham, NC, USA) with Rich Mooney (Department of Neurobiology) and Duke University with Steve Nowicki (Department of Biology) where he examined the cellular basis of song production. In 2002 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB, Canada) and promoted to Associate Professor of Psychology in 2008. Sturdy continues to study songbird communication and cognition in an integrative fashion, combining several approaches to understand the biological and cognitive bases of underlying songbird acoustic communication.

Sturdy is a member of the BioCognition Unit and study  the neuroethology of songbird acoustic communication. Sturdy uses several empirical approaches, from bioacoustic analyses of vocalizations, operant discrimination paradigms and field playback experiments to electrophysiological and neuroanatomical techniques as well as artificial neural network approaches, with the long-term goal of understanding the behavioural, cognitive and neural substrates underlying songbird vocal production and perception, auditory perception and cognition.

Google Scholar Page 

Departmental webpage

Funding generously provided to my students and me by:

Societies with which I'm affiliated:

Some journals and books with which I am affiliated and in which I have published: