Delighted to welcome Vivek Nityananda as the first of the three Leverhulme-funded research associates working on the “Man, Mantis and Machine” project. Vivek currently holds a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship from the European Union. For this, he’s working on visual search and attention in bumblebees with Prof Lars Chittka at Queen Mary, London. Previously, he’s worked on acoustic communication in frogs and bush-crickets at the University of Minnesota and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Vivek will be starting work on the M3 project once his Marie Curie fellowship has finished in September. I’m delighted he’ll be joining us, and look forward to a highly productive time together.